My Last SX-70 Image?

Shot No. 10 from my last pack of Polaroid SX-70 Blend, an overpriced but serviceable way of rescuing the peerless SX-70 model 2 from the sad fate of being a dust-gathering collectible and putting it to work. As you can see from the greenish tint of the image, the film is over two years old, and the chemicals have become a little unstable. Unfortunately, it seems like Blend, which was made in Belgium, has disappeared, following Polaroid's shutdown of their European film facilities. There's a fellow who for $20 will sell you a neutral density filter that fits over a pack of Polaroid 600, which can then be inserted into the SX-70, after the pack's little plastic fins are sliced off. But even standard 600, staple of the Polaroid One Shot, is getting hard to find. And the price is going up as supplies diminish. I saw a double pack of 600, 20 shots, at WalMart recently for close to $30.

Flash provided by a vintage flashbar salvaged from my dad's Polaroid Pronto RF outfit. Not an awful camera exactly -- it featured split-image rangefinder focus -- but the slow plastic lens was perfectly inadequate to anything but the most rudimentary image making. In the early 1970s, he paid around $90 for it.

If I can score some more 600, I may just run a pack through the Polaroid Sun 660 that I bought at Value World for $3.83 -- never used, the neck strap still has its factory clips on it, and the colorful late 1970s tags are still attached. The Land List says the lenses for this model were plastic, but it qualifies that parenthetically with a question mark. The lens on my Sun 660 is crystal clear, whether it's plastic or glass. I'm curious to see how the sonar-based autofocus system works.

It's all like a race against time. As for my lovely SX-70, it breaks my heart to see such a first-rate camera become obsolete.

UPDATE:

I was able to peel the neutral density filter from the top of the empty SX-70 Blend pack and it's ready to slap onto any 600 pack I might purchase. Sweet!