Polaroid Type 42

Type 42 was the workhorse medium-speed roll film in Polaroid's Series 40 lineup, ISO 200 panchromatic black and white, 3.25 by 4.25 inch print area. The Series 40 rolls fed the Model 95 Land Camera, the Pathfinder 110A and 110B, and the long tail of professional cameras Polaroid sold from 1948 onward. At ISO 200 it sat between the slower Type 41 it replaced and the higher-speed Type 44 and Type 47, a balanced general-purpose choice for daylight and well-lit interior work.

Development ran 60 seconds at room temperature, with a sepia-warm midrange and the protective coater wand step every Polaroid roll film required. Users who skipped the coating were left with prints that yellowed inside a few months. The cameras that took Type 42 were built around 60-second peel and a specific film geometry; everything from the rollers in the camera back to the pod chemistry was tuned to that workflow.

Grain was visible but well-controlled for the era, with tonal rendering some users compared with a softer Plus-X print at the same enlargement. Compared with Type 47 at ISO 3000 in the same format, Type 42 gave you cleaner shadow gradation and finer texture in the midrange, at the cost of needing more light. Against the slower stocks in the Series 30 size, the larger print scaled up well for actual display, not just contact use.

Polaroid kept Type 42 in production for an unusually long stretch because the cameras that took it stayed in use long after the catalog declared them obsolete. Pathfinders and 95-series bodies sat in working photographers' cabinets for decades. The roll-film line finally ended in 1992 when the last Series 40 stocks rolled off the coating lines alongside Type 47 and Type 44.

Reciprocity exponent is 1.0. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second, but on Type 42 the correction is zero. A 4-second metered exposure stays at 4 seconds at the print. Long-exposure work in a Pathfinder on a tripod was rare, but when it happened the math was simple.