because the old stuff is better, and eventually will become unusable anyway. plus new55 is so far from being a viable replacement or even decent in it's own right, it needs time to mature before they bother trying to sell it again.
because the old stuff is better, and eventually will become unusable anyway. plus new55 is so far from being a viable replacement or even decent in it's own right, it needs time to mature before they bother trying to sell it again.
Exactly!
I can see your point. However with such smal markets for this kind of film a company just doesn't have the luxury of developing a complete and flawles product. That is too expensive and too time consuming. New55 just like Impossible and undoubtley Kaps with the FP100c restart need to sell products that are not 100% good to make money and keep developing the film to perfection. If you don't like that idea that is fine but steering people away from companies that do their stinking best to develop a good product is not classy in my book. if you don't like it don't buy it. I get that it is expensive stuff and that it might fail. I like the imperfections of the film although sometimes it can be rather annoying. But thinking of the bigger picture I applaud them for even trying to do this. It is too easy to critise someone for trying. But this is how I think about it.
Their biggest obstacle was pretty obvious: They were still thinking in terms of a 1999-like film market. When I was down visiting and pointed out to Sam that he only needed to produce enough pods to meet current demand, it was like a light bulb turned on and he realized they had been artificially limiting their thinking. He realized they could use smaller equipment (and more importantly, exponentially cheaper equipment) to do what they need to do.
I wish them the best of luck .. the film industry needs smaller businesses driving innovation in this new reality we find ourselves in. The big guys from film’s heydey cannot or will not drive the development of new (or re-introduced) products. While the market is smaller, film industry has taken on much healthier, more robust characteristics than when it was dominated by a single giant yellow monolith.
-Jason
Newly made large format dry plates available! Look:
https://www.pictoriographica.com
The root problem with the attempts to remake instant film materials is that a successful result is extremely difficult to engineer. It took massive amounts of engineering knowledge and research time to build a finished product that worked well and was reliable. T-55 was funded not only by Polaroid but the "giant yellow monolith" as well.
Admittedly the current entrepeneurs are reverse-engineering (formerly) existing products, so have a head start, but "the devil is in the details".
Even Polaroid sheet film wasn't 100% reliable, and we had to be religious about the care and handling of our 545 holders, but we accepted the occasional failure; because the result was excellent most of the time. If the new guys can't improve their quality beyond the "wow, we got something! kinda goofy looking, but it's something!" level, they are doomed.
I do wish them the best of luck, and I do think that it can be done. it will just take a lot of money, hard work, and persistence. How much, we'll find out.
Another consideration is who has successfully produced and marketed an instant film product?Originally Posted by Mark Sampson
Polaroid.
Kodak, until they got caught in patent infringement and lost.
Fuji.
All others have either not attempted it or failed to sucessfully produce a quality product and quit!
agreed with Mark Sampson and Bob. The "so-so" quality product has no place in the market, really. At least not if it's going to be sold for anything close to "full" price. If they can't make it well, they should not sell it until they can. And yeah, I am not a buyer for that sort of stuff, but if it was on-point quality-wise, I would be. Until then, expired Fp100c and Polaroid 55 will have to do in the immediate term. And as robust as the film market might appear now, with the smaller players, it's a shadow of it's former self in the 80s/90s. There were even more small players back then, than now, plus all the big players with their hugely encompassing product lines.
Sam, Forget the pods and instant processing. Readyloads are what is needed with a simple holder for reduction of weight and volume.
The magic you are looking for is in the work you are avoiding.
http://www.searing.photography
Blasphemus!!!! Of course we need instant film. Go wash your mouth with soap now my child!
Re: Sam Hiser is still working on the New55 technology
There are a few good thoughts here that I can take on-board. Some I'll leave alone ;-)
Some people talk as if New55 PN were just another product, and I wish they would be just a little more circumspect. The thing would be very different if there was even ONE competitor in instant 4x5 peel-apart. The fact that nobody popped up after the New55 Holdings, LLC, dissolution should tell you something about the difficulty and the deterrent and nothing about the level of market interest -- which is still off-the-hook.
Turns out I am working for Ed Sawyer after all, since he said he WOULD be a buyer if New55 PN's quality were to improve. You can be sure there is no point in continuing this format without a plan to fix the design and performance issues. We aren't trying to be as LAME as POSSIBLE. Improved performance is the beginning of the way to get the 90-plus-% of the market we left behind in the R&D proof-of-principle phase.
Pods are relevant to this. It took me far too long to recognize the number of ways pods can kill performance; so this pause, this chance to take stock and look at the thing from a number of different angles, has been productive. Some of you might recall how we had a bad paper coating experience during the Kickstarter fulfillment period. Either nobody was doing what we needed or we lacked the experience to articulate our needs (to this one particular vendor); but we had the engineering skills to take that process in-house and were successful at producing in a way that taught us how to manage a large job later, off-campus, if needed. We can do the same with pods upon bringing that part in house, too. With a very consistent no-bloat pod made under our QC, the New55 PN system will have a kind of ease and confidence in reliability that the 545 holder never, ever, saw. Some of this also depends upon a better quality print paper and new sleeve design which were inevitable all along and are now in progress. I think the Gen3 version of New55 PN should bring some wallflowers off the sidelines -- even at the same high price, which is not going to budge for a while.
This performance / value jump does that thing in micro-economics where the Demand Curve (Y-axis is PRICE, X-axis is QUANTITY; the DEMAND Curve looks like this \) gets pushed outward (to the right). So at the same high price our new Curve indicates 1.5X to 2.0X the previous Quantity. THEN, it's at the ensuing Price-Cut (which in my opinion ought to be an emphatic 30%-off) that gives us a new Quantity reading of something like 3.0X the original. Roll this out in North America, Europe and Asia and we have the kind of support that we need to grow the business (by, say, rolling out complementary products like COLOR and different speeds). We estimate there are 100K-200K 4x5 cameras in use in US & Europe taken together. We have no idea about Asia, but going forward with the business is the way to find that out.
I am encouraged by the number of new camera makers who have entered since our 2014 Kickstarter. We've lost Ebony, but Chamonix and Shen Hao are there; Toyo is there; Nagaoka is still there; Canham and Linhof of course; and we have added Intrepid, Walker, Gibellini, BOMM, Stenopeika, and VDS. That's a reflection of a healthy ecosystem -- particularly in a field where old cameras don't die and the new ones add cumulatively.
Yes, the market is different than in the golden age, but that is now receding further and further out of relevance. I am excited about the level of activity today in large format photography happening on its own terms among artists, portraitists, conceptualists and amateurs alike. We are trying to understand 4x5 workers, methods & motivations but the 8x10 market is even more exciting in some ways (not in terms of absolute number of participants but) because of what the 8x10 scale means to expression. So we will need to develop our Gen5 film-packet, holder and processing system from scratch for 8x10 and feed back the best aspects of that adventure to the Gen5 system for 4x5.
There's a lot to do and the enthusiasm I am witnessing in large-format is the sine qua non.
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