Welcome back to Dr. Love’s Tips! This week, Impossible USA’s Camera Resource Manager Frank Love discusses the SLR 680…
For any of you who happen to own an SLR 680, you know it is a beautifully well-crafted work of art of instant electronic machinery….it also tends to produce more ‘divots’ or [‘undeveloped patches’] than your friend’s SX-70 camera.
You may be wondering…why?
The simple answer here is the one thing in the ejection process that changes from the older SX-70 cameras to the SLR 680 and 690 model folding cameras, that is the rollers.
The roller set on these cameras are a little different than the ones found on the SX-70s. The rollers were changed to improve durability and grip on the film, but in the case of newer, more sensitive Impossible films, sometimes there is a less perfect spread of developer leaving the gap of paste at the top of the frame.
Now the whole issue isn’t really simple, as it’s not just the rollers that affect this. It is…the rollers from camera to camera, cleanliness of the rollers, temperature, the exposure levels (mostly white vs. mostly black) of an image, and different versions of the films themselves…that can all factor into whether you get any ‘divot’ at all, or the degree of its size.
This is, to some extent, a fact of life that this can happen for a 680 owner. The best things one can do to try and avoid this is first and foremost…keep your rollers clean…and I mean clean. Even a little residue on the rollers can result in uneven spreading leaving the gap at the top. Beyond this, you may realize that in certain temperatures you get them, or others you don’t, so you can seek to avoid the ‘divot temperature’, but of course this is a limited option.
Lastly, one simple, yet not so simple fix, is to swap the door off your 680 and put a door from an SX-70 onto your 680. This is simple as it’s just swapping the door (Click here to see how)…but not if you don’t also have a folding SX-70 camera to do so with. You can look for a scrap camera or spare door, but do remember that even this isn’t a guarantee to divots every time.
I hope these tips can help those of you suffering from too many unwanted divots in your life. As always, and especially here,
Keep your rollers clean,
-f
I just tried your PX680 product in my SLR680 Polaroid camera, and i am deeply disappointed. There is a major problem with these so called “divots” you describe, to the extent that 1/2 of the surface is showing an attempt to show a picture (of very low quality anyway), the upper half is a “divot” every time. It is sad that to cover up for a useless product you try to blame everything else-temperature, rollers, light or dark, and even give advice to replace the rollers with ones from the SX-70 ( all the while i thought and you are claiming so that the PX 680 was developed for the 600 series cameras- so why is it working better with the SX-70 that has a separate film developed specially for it? I have my rollers removed, they are clean, the camera is nearly new, and winding and pushing and old real polaroid picture through it (rollers removed from the camera) shows the same amount of resistance as running your film thru it. So the thickness of your “film” is the same, it just simply does not work. i don’t see how long can one experiment with all the variable excuses you are giving at about $3.00 a try- i for one am done with it. The film i have was manufactured in May of 2012, so it is within the short usable range the Company is quoting.