I’ve updated my review of the Polaroid Big Swinger 3000, the first rigid-bodied camera for packfilm. It’s from 1968. Read my updated review here.
I’ve updated my review of the Polaroid Big Swinger 3000, the first rigid-bodied camera for packfilm. It’s from 1968. Read my updated review here.
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Wow, I don’t think I have ever seen one of these.
They’re a little uncommon, though not exactly rare.
Did you ever see the “Big Shot” variation on these? A ridiculous idea: the camera had a fixed close-up focus for taking portraits only!
These all-plastic Polaroids were pretty dreadful compared to their ancestors. For that matter the roll film did a better job than the sheets in my opinion.
Didn’t Andy Warhol get a lot of mileage out of a Big Shot?
I owned a rigid-bodied Polaroid camera, a Super Shooter, as a kid. It was fun, but the film was stupid expensive on my dollar-a-week allowance so I didn’t shoot it as much as I would have liked.
When I started collecting again in 2006 the Polaroid films were gone, but the Fuji films were still produced. I bought an Automatic 250, which was a great camera that just didn’t like the plastic Fuji film packs at all. Also it took a weird, hard-to-find battery. But oh, that Zeiss rangefinder!
The big sin of the rigid-bodied cameras, most of them, was their plastic lenses. I’m pretty sure this Big Swinger had glass. Early Colorpack IIs had glass. I had an early Colorpack II and it was good. I loved using it.
The roll films were out of production long before I could ever shoot any, so I’ll never know. But to me, the pack films were the best of Polaroid.
Indeed Mr. Warhol shot perhaps thousands of images with a Big Shot, which he then turned into silk screen prints and such.
The old Polaroid roll film had nice colour tones (even the B&W version) and the cameras were very well made then. As years progressed Polaroids quality went down just like everyone else’s.