Polaroid: you don’t know what you have until it is gone

Interesting article in Newsweek about the demise of Polaroid in analog form and it resurrection in digital form. 8mm film is being revived the same way. How many music videos and ads have you seen with what looks like 8mm footage? Country music videos are great for this. Though more subtle, Kodachrome is going through a similar revival.

This article raises an interesting point that we see reinforced every day in our scanning service. People that are truly happy with our services embrace the use of scanned slides and negatives as a memory tool. Those that are unhappy tend to be in the camp that thinks that digitized film should look like images shot today, on fancy digital cameras.

Do you want your Kodachrome to look like Kodachrome – highly saturated colors and contrasty – or like a modern image with fluid tonalities and colors? If you use the images simply as documents of an event, the latter may be appealing. If, instead, they are remembrances of times, people and places past, meant to trigger emotion and memory and to encourage discussion and storytelling, then Kodachrome should look like Kodachrome.