Polaroid Type 108

Type 108 was Polaroid's first widely available color pack film, launched in 1963 as Polacolor. Edwin Land introduced it at a press demonstration in New York that produced an instant color print in roughly sixty seconds, which at the time read closer to a magic trick than a photographic process. The chemistry was a dye-coupler system released through a pod laminated to the negative, similar in concept to the black-and-white pack films but with three color layers and a stack of developer dyes.

In 1975 Polaroid reformulated as Polacolor 2 while keeping the Type 108 designation. The new emulsion held color better over time and was less prone to the orange shifts that plagued original Polacolor prints. Even improved, color stability was the weak point. A Polacolor 2 print kept in an album for thirty years usually shows some warm shift, and one stored in heat or light shows much more.

ISO 75 daylight balance was strict. Tungsten exposure required an 80B filter and a one-stop opening. Andy Warhol's Big Shot portrait series used Type 108 routinely. The Big Shot was a fixed-focus, fixed-aperture portrait camera Polaroid built from 1971 to 1973, designed for headshots on this exact film. Warhol kept his after discontinuation and shot Type 108 in it through the late 1970s.

Compared to Kodak Instamatic color prints from the same era, Polacolor 2 ran warmer, with denser reds and slightly less neutral midtones. Skin tones could go ruddy in mixed light. The print surface was glossy where Kodak's was matte.

Format was 3.25 by 4.25 inch pack film in eight or ten frame packs, fitting Polaroid 100 series cameras, the Big Shot, the Mamiya Universal with pack back, and the 405 holder. Discontinued around 2003. Surviving packs are twenty years past expiration and color shifts are universal at this point.

Reciprocity exponent is 1.0. Zone Light Meter treats the metered time as the shot time. For studio portrait work on tripod where Type 108 was often used at f/16 with strobe, the absence of correction kept the math simple.