Most of Polaroid's assembly equipment was sold as scrap and some was even pushed off the second floor and crashed onto the parking lot. Along with instant sheet film, Polaroid packaged and sold various 4x5 sheet films in single-use envelopes that could not be recycled. In 2015, New55 started selling 1SHOT tm ready loaded film with several types of black and white films in a recyclable format. http://shop.new55.net/
Yeah at over eight bucks a sheet for HP5, seven for their film and I was afraid to look at color.Originally Posted by vdonovan
No thanks.
Fuji Quickloads were great, we used them extensively for commercial location shoots. Never failed.
I used booth Fuji Quickloads and Kodak Readyloads from 100 shots I had maybe 1 failure I still have 2 packs of each in the freezer!
And I still would buy them!
I was really encouraged by this and then noticed it was over $10 per sheet? Wow.
I used Readyloads and Quickloads for years with a failure rate of 1% or less. For me they were worth every penny I spent on them. They were much easier and lighter than film holders for travel especially for overseas. I would continue to buy them if available today.
The flatness of the film in the dedicated holders wasn't ideal, especially on the insertion side. I ended up highly modifying a select 545 holder (sorting through
several of those), which has served me well with all the film sleeves, both brands. I used up the last of my sleeves a year ago, except for one full box of E100G
still in the freezer. I'd be interested in hearing any real-world feedback about this new startup system, since it apparently would also work in holder.
i used them, they were great, also used the holder for
other ready load packets ... i stopped buying them
not so much because they didn't work but because
i really couldn't justify the trash/waste associated with
the product. im trying to lessen my footprint, and unfortunately
a few months ago, after exposing IDK 100 sheets of 100E all my
efforts were pretty much erased ...
Quickloads and Readyloads were great for commercial photographers because the "real" film could be run in the same holder moments after getting the art director to sign off on the lighting and set-up on an instant B&W Polaroid in the same holder, without displacing the camera, changing backs, etc. The then~$3/sheet cost for color 4x5" E6 chrome film was an expense, and the net cost to the photographer was zero, as the cost of consumables was passed along. But all that flipped with digital medium format backs by the mid-late 1990's. Good enough for most uses, providing instant feedback, no 1-hour E6 lab needed, and especially no drum-scanning pre-print costs, all of which when added up completely disrupted commercial studio photography workflows, and in particular, it cratered Polaroid. Commercial uses of film once far, far eclipsed hobbyist use of large format.
But fortunately by the time this all unraveled, QL and RL use was pretty well established or even entrenched among a niche of backpacking nature photographers, and among those who traveled through airports (The darksleeved film was particularly well-suited to TSA hand-inspection of film). E6 and C41 Readyload and particularly Quickload hung on a good while longer; Astia 100F and Pro 160S Fuji QL were available with current freshness dates until 5 or perhaps 6 years ago in the USA and a bit longer in Japan, B&W Acros hung in almost but not as long, as I recall. A few enterprising folks hoarded and froze what they could find, and there was for a time a cottage industry on EBay of dealers seeking to double or triple what the films originally cost.
It was this last gasp, I think, that has set the bar so high for the present pricing, but it seems pretty absurd to me, especially considering most users today can't simply pass off the cost of consumables to a client. Too, when scanning for printing hybrid, dusting and spotting has become relatively trivial in Photoshop and Lightroom (even if boring and time consuming to do) contrasted with dust ruining a frame for optical Ilfochrome/ Cibachrome printing. The number of tasks that dark-sleeved 4x5 negs and chromes once were essential for dwindled to economic nothingness for the film manufacturers, evidently.
I came to LF late in the aughts and one of the reasons I dove in was that Quickloads were still available new in my favorite E6 emulsions. The later version of the Kodak single-sheet holder with the pressure plate was what I used and it was great, with never a film flatness problem.
Found I really, really needed Quickloads when shooting in dusty desert conditions, blowing sand, and static-ky low California arid conditions. While I've trashed a few frames (mostly where the clip didn't re-engauge the sleeve to light seal the assembly after exposure, there's a tap-tap-tap trick specific to that, yet doesn't always work) but I've also killed 6 frames at a time in a Grafmatic, on balance, and also wrecked a lot of Ektar and Portra in Grafmatics due to the static charge attracting dust, at places such as Pinnacles.
Personally, I would love to see a revival in the single-shot QL and RL form factors for existing color neg films. Ektar never was available in it, nor newer iterations of Portra.
I did fine in the desert using anti-static spray on my holders, and by literally grounding metal cameras with an alligator clip, a bit of speaker wire, and a nail I could push in the soil. But March winds - nope - I simply gave up on those, esp on clay or alkali playas. More a Nov thru Feb strategy. High desert, like most of
the Colorado Plateau canyon country, has never given me any headaches - and actually relieved quite a few headaches, at least until I had to leave and come back
to work.
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