Welcome back to Dr. Love’s Tips, where Impossible USA’s Camera Resource Manager Frank Love provides you with helpful advice on how to get the best out of your Polaroid cameras and Impossible film. This issue: Decoding the numbers on the back of the photo!
What do those numbers on the back of my images mean?
Those numbers are the ‘Frame Code. This code is how you can decipher which film this frame is, and when it was manufactured.
This 10 digit code breaks down into 5 pieces, which each set of 2 digits giving you a specific piece of information. Please refer to our picture for a detailed breakdown.
Effectively, the first 4 digits are not unlike a date (08/11=Aug. ‘11, etc.). The machine number is more for internal records and doesn’t really tell you the shooter anything about the film. The film type code is probably one of the more useful ones, as this will help you with whether this is a PX100 shot or PX 600 shot. Lastly the last two digits are simply the day of the month of the production batch.
As you can see the code is the same for PZ films except of course that there is not 100 or 70 versions. Also note that on the earlier versions of all films, there was no established code, so that if you don’t have a code, or perhaps is just says “32”, then this is early first flush film.
Hopefully this will help some of you identify what some of your shots are, and as always…
Keep your rollers clean,
-f
Awesome I was wondering what they meant – I was mostly right! :)