Polaroid Type 48

Type 48 is what color Polaroid looked like before the SX-70 and the white-border square existed. Polaroid introduced it in 1963 as one of the first commercial color instant films in the world, the product of years of chemical engineering contemporaries called among the hardest problems ever solved in consumer photography. It loaded into the same roll-film Land cameras shooting Polaroid B&W since 1948, and produced six color prints per roll at 3 1/4 by 4 1/4 inches.

The ASA started at 50 and was bumped to 75 shortly after launch, which is the rating most surviving boxes carry. The chemistry was a peel-apart pod: shoot, pull the roll through the rollers, wait, then separate the print from the negative side. Unlike Polaroid B&W of the period, Type 48 did not need a print coater, which made it more convenient at the kitchen table even if the color stability of an uncoated print could not compete with a C-print.

Color rendition is what you would expect from the first commercial peel-apart color: warm, slightly soft, magentas and yellows cleaner than greens or blues. Compared with later Polacolor 2 films, Type 48 has softer dye saturation and drifts toward orange as the print ages. Most surviving prints from the 1960s and 1970s look more pastel now than they did at the camera.

The bodies Type 48 was made for are the Polaroid Model 95 series and the Model 150 / 800 / 900 that followed. They are sixty-plus years old now. Rollers harden, bellows leak, finding one that still pulls a roll is its own project.

Polaroid discontinued Type 48 in 1976. Sales had fallen far enough that retooling as Polaroid moved away from Kodak negative stock was not worth it. Neither Impossible nor modern Polaroid has reissued it.

Reciprocity exponent is 1.0. Zone Light Meter applies the calculation past one second, but with 1.0 there is no correction. Metered time is the shot time. For decades-expired Type 48 the bigger issue is base fog and dye shift, so meter conservatively and accept that any image you pull is partly a chemistry experiment.