Polaroid Type 690

Type 690 was Polaroid's professional pack film, marketed as Polacolor Pro 100 and introduced in 2003 to replace the earlier Type 679 and Type 689. The format is 3 1/4 by 4 1/4 inches in a ten-shot pack, loading into the 100-series and 600SE holders that working pros relied on through the 1990s. ISO is nominally 100, though Polaroid's own data sheet at one point listed 125, and the discrepancy fed years of forum posts.

The selling point in 2003 was re-engineered chemistry that made development almost self-timing, the first peel-apart film where you no longer had to count seconds with a watch. Pull the tab, wait, peel. The print came out with better color rendition and lower contrast than the Type 689 it replaced, which mattered for portrait shooters who had been complaining about magenta-heavy skin tones in the earlier emulsion.

Compared with Fujifilm FP-100C, the competing pack film of the same era, Type 690 ran warmer and slightly less saturated. FP-100C had cleaner cyans, Polaroid had more believable skin. Commercial shooters loaded 690 in the 600SE for location portrait proofs before exposing on Kodak Portra sheets. The price per pack was high enough that no one shot it casually.

Polaroid discontinued its entire instant film line in 2008 when the original company collapsed. Fujifilm continued FP-100C until 2016, but no equivalent to Type 690 ever came back. Cold-stored packs from 2008 era can still produce usable prints, though the pod chemistry is the limiting factor more often than the emulsion itself.

Format is the 100-series pack, ten exposures. There was never a sheet or roll version.

The reciprocity exponent is 1.0. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second, though the math barely shifts the result. A metered 2-second exposure stays at roughly 2 seconds at the film. For studio strobe work reciprocity is a non-issue; for rare available-light setups past a second, Polacolor Pro's latitude absorbed small errors well enough that bracketing was rarely necessary.