Polaroid Type 665

Type 665 was the pack-film sibling of Type 55, designed for Polaroid's 100-series Land Camera pack film format rather than the 4x5 sheet holders. The print size was 3.25x4.25 inches, the negative peeled away from the pod material the same way as Type 55, and you cleared it in the same sodium sulfite bath. A smaller negative, but still a real negative with genuine grain structure.

Helmut Newton used it for portrait scouting and test work. The value to Newton was the same value it had for any working photographer with a pack film camera on a portrait job: you shot a test, pulled the negative, confirmed the lighting setup was correct before loading the 4x5 view camera or the medium format back. The negative was small but printable, and you had it in your hand in 90 seconds.

ISO 80 is slow enough that pack film cameras with their more limited shutter speeds than view camera lenses could run into exposure problems in dim light. Most 100-series Land Cameras with the electric-eye shutter actually ran out to 10 seconds at the slow end, so reciprocity could become a factor on dim available-light scenes even with the camera doing the timing.

Reciprocity exponent is 1.0. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second. With a 1.0 exponent, a 4-second meter reading stays at 4 seconds; the linearity is unusual compared to conventional panchromatic emulsions, where you would add time.

Polaroid discontinued Type 665 along with the rest of the pack film line in 2008. Fujifilm FP-100C and FP-3000B filled the pack film gap until Fuji also discontinued those in 2016, leaving a large installed base of 100-series cameras and no compatible film. Supersense in Vienna has been hand-building a peel-apart replacement called ONE INSTANT since 2018, using legacy Polaroid materials and fresh pod chemistry from the 20x24 Studio, but volume remains tiny and the per-shot price is high.