Polaroid Polacolor 2

Polacolor 2 arrived in 1975 as Polaroid's first peel-apart color film built on the dye chemistry developed for the SX-70 integral system. The older Polacolor that Edwin Land's team introduced in 1963 used a dye-developer set of azo dyes for yellow and magenta with anthraquinone for cyan, and the prints had known longevity problems; Polacolor 2 reformulated the dye-developer chemistry around new premetallized dyes that gave deeper saturation and better lightfastness. The launch covered Type 88 for square cameras, Type 108 for rectangular Land cameras, and a 4x5 sheet variant for view holders.

Daylight balanced at ISO 80 with electronic flash compatibility, the film was tuned for accurate skin tones at the cost of louder saturation. Compared to Type 108 it ran cleaner in highlights and held finer detail in shadow blacks. Next to Fuji's later FP-100C, Polacolor 2 lands closer to a neutral chromogenic print: less punch, more restraint.

Press shooters and forensic photographers leaned on it heavily through the late seventies and into the eighties for one reason. You saw the result in sixty seconds. Newspaper crime-scene work, real-estate documentation, and ID badges all standardized around the 80 series before one-hour labs took over.

The positive print was the deliverable; the leftover negative material went in the trash, since Polacolor 2 was not positive/negative film the way Type 55 was. If you wanted both, you needed Type 665 or Type 55.

Polaroid wound down the 80 series in 2006 and the rest of the peel-apart lines in 2008. There has been no new production since. What circulates on eBay is twenty-plus years past expiry. Expect color shifts toward magenta or cyan, and patchy development on most rolls.

Reciprocity exponent is 1.0. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second on the standard curve, which means metered time is the shot time. For studio strobe or daylight handheld work, the threshold never came up. For copy stand and macro applications where pack film actually got used at small apertures, the exposure simply behaved as metered.