Polaroid SX-70 Color

The SX-70 camera is a folding single-lens reflex that came out in 1972 and was designed around ISO 160 film. The original Polaroid Time-Zero SX-70 film was slower than the 600-series because the camera's shutter speed range assumed it. When the Impossible Project first tried to revive SX-70 film, getting the speed right was one of the harder problems; their early SX-70 emulsions were notoriously unreliable. Current Polaroid SX-70 Color is significantly more stable.

Andy Warhol shot SX-70 obsessively through the 1970s. His Factory Polaroids and the celebrity portraits from that decade are the most-cited cultural record of what SX-70 images look like: slightly painterly, softened at the edges from the lens, with colors that read as memory rather than documentation. David Hockney made collages from grids of SX-70 prints, working with the square format's inherent geometry. Neither of them was shooting for technical precision; they were using the physical print as the artifact.

At ISO 160, the SX-70 system needs more light than a 600 camera. Outdoors in shade it works fine. Indoors without supplemental flash, the shutter drops to long exposures and the camera's auto-exposure will try to compensate, sometimes successfully. The colors read warm, shifting yellow-orange in tungsten without correction. In daylight they are more neutral than the 600 color emulsion.

Reciprocity exponent is 1.0. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second, though the SX-70's auto-exposure handles most situations within the camera's shutter range. Cold temperature is still the main enemy: keep the pack above 55F. Development takes around 10 minutes for full density.