Saturday 11 April 2015

Polaroid 600 SE

In the past I've owned one other medium format rangefinder, and that was a Mamiya press, this Polaroid camera was intended as a professional camera of the highest standard, the basis for the camera is the Mamiya Press, which has created a very unusual camera, with a fairly good following, and not without good reason.

The Polaroid 600SE accepts Polaroid Type 100 film which includes Fujifilms offerings of FP100C, FP100B and FP3000B, the last two have been discontinued but can still be found.
There are three lenses available in the system, 75mm wide angle, 127mm standard and a 150mm slight telephoto.

The camera itself is a fairly simple design, a rangefinder with a well designed patch, framelines for the 127mm and 150mm lenses, the shutter itself is housed in the lenses with speeds from 1second all the way to 1/500th and includes B. The backs are interchangeable and can use a special adapter to use standard Mamiya Press backs so allows access to 6x9 images on 120 film with the backs from a Mamiya Press, also in that range is 6x4.5, 6x6, 6x7.

From my brief experience so far, it seems a well made camera with a unique ability to use Fujifilm PackFilm and be in full control over focus and exposure.
The 127mm lens seems to be quite sharp and has decent rendering and can produce some nice out of focus rendering which would be useful for portraits.