Fujifilm FP-100C

FP-100C was the last color peel-apart pack film made for the Polaroid Land camera format. Fujifilm kept it in production long after Polaroid abandoned the format, and by the 2010s it had become both a working photographer's material and a collector's item. When Fujifilm announced discontinuation in 2016, photographers bought out old stock in a pattern that looked less like hoarding and more like grief.

The film worked in any Polaroid pack-film camera that accepted 100-series film: the Automatic Land series, the EE series, the folder-bellows models from the 1960s through 1980s. It also worked in Fujifilm's own FP-series cameras and in the Mamiya Universal system with a pack-film back. Studio photographers had used earlier Polaroid equivalents for Polaroid test shots before digital review existed, and FP-100C inherited that use case.

The positive print had warm color and moderate saturation. Faces photographed well on it. Outdoor daylight work landed more accurately than the warm cast might suggest. The prints degraded over time and with humidity, which was part of the charm for some photographers and an archival problem for others.

The recoverable negative is the detail that kept FP-100C in conversation after digital took most of its working uses. After peeling, the chemical layer on the backing sheet can be cleaned with a dilute bleach solution to reveal a negative. Scanned and inverted, these negatives have high resolution and a texture that photographers working in mixed analog-digital workflows found interesting. The negative-recovery technique spread through online film communities in the early 2010s.

Reciprocity exponent is listed as 1.0, meaning the film was designed to correct linearly past one second. Zone Light Meter applies no reciprocity expansion for FP-100C beyond the metered value. For a pack film rated at ISO 100, most exposures stayed short enough that reciprocity was rarely the concern.