It's a bit difficult to be frugal because ultimately you have to test it with a pack of fresh, known good film.
- open by pulling up on the back of the viewfinder. Everything should pop into place reasonably easily. DO NOT PRESS THE SHUTTER RELEASE! - examine the bellows for holes, tears, etc. - check the lens with a flash light to see that there's nothing in it that might cause a problem. - Look through the viewfinder and see if the lens focuses correctly (knob on the right) - Looking into the meter cell on the left with a flash light, turn the light/dark control and see that the metering adjustment filter move smoothly as you work the control through its range. - open the film compartment (button on the RH side). Pull out any film pack that might be in there. - with a flashlight, examine the interior of the film compartment. The large trapezoidal mirror on top should be reasonably clean and in one piece. Look for obvious corrosion on the battery contacts. Check the film transport assembly in the trap door... turn it by the gears on the RH side. It should roll smoothly and easily. The rollers should be clean. Next you need at least one pack of good film and preferably one empty film holder with a known good battery and a couple of junk prints. (I always keep a couple of empty film packs around with known good batteries for testing purposes, along with a cover sheet and five or six junk prints.) - If you have an empty pack with a known good battery, push it in, close the film door. When you close the door, you should hear the mechanism cycle as that is the cover sheet ejection cycle. - Now release the shutter with the empty film pack while looking through the viewfinder. You should see and hear the mirror cycle. Do this a couple of times looking into the lens as well to be certain the shutter cycles. - Presuming the mechanism cycles and seems to work smoothly, if you have a few junk prints and/or a cover sheet, remove the empty film pack and reload the pack with the junk prints and cover sheet. Be sure not to jam them - they have to be flat - and be sure the little folding flap on the back of the cover sheet is removed so it down't jam the picker arm. Once the pack is loaded, replace it into the camera and watch the top print or cover sheet eject. Then cycle the shutter and see that the prints eject smoothly. - If you don't have an empty pack with a good battery handy, you have to do the above three steps with a known good film pack. (The reason you don't press the button and try it without looking first for corrosion or damage is that if there's an old pack in the camera, many of these cameras have been sitting for a very long time and the un-exposed prints have 'leaked' and bonded together. Even if the battery has good charge, they can jam or break the picker mechanism if they are bonded together.) In this case, you simply have to test by fitting a known good pack and seeing if the cover sheet is ejected, and whether the shutter and mirror cycles through taking a photo and ejecting the print properly. So you lose at least one exposure to pure testing. - Okay, One way or another, you've figured out that the camera's reasonably clean and the mechanism works. Consider the first pack of good film a test pack and just shoot through it, exercising the focus and light/dark control. Impossible Project SX-70 B&W or Color film packs are all the same price so which you buy to try the camera doesn't matter on that score, but the B&W processes in about three-four minutes where the color takes up to 40 minutes. So I tend to use B&W to get things rolling first. The Impossible SX-70 films tend to be a little faster than the original Polaroid film, and like any old camera the shutter on many of these is a bit slower than it ought to be now, so set the light/dark control to one or two notches towards the darken side as a starting point. Presuming the camera is healthy and you run a few packs through it, you'll find the exposure will drift a bit through the first few packs until everything moves the way it ought to, and then it becomes pretty consistent. Also, the Impossible films are still a little light sensitive when they're first ejected from the camera. Indoors, you can just cover them with your hand as the prints eject and turn them face side down onto a table while they process. Outdoors, you need to tape a flexible tongue or blind over the outbound slot (I use Artist's Tape and a cover sheet) that protects them from sunlight, then quickly fetch them into a bag or your pocket to process. After a minute or so, the reagent is fully light-proof and they can be handled like SX-70 prints of old while they process, but I just keep them in my pocket until they're finished. Resources: - The Impossible Project (the-impossible-project.com) makes film and sells accessories and other stuff. Good folks, they are trying to do an impossible thing and slowly succeeding. The films are on their fifth generation now, and are beginning to be very good. - MiNT Camera (mint-camera.com) in Hong Kong are another batch of great folks. They will do evaluation and repairs, they sell refurbished cameras, electronic flash units, and accessory lens lens sets (close up, ND, and other filters). I'm having a ball working with their latest creation, the SLR670m with Time Machine: first and only Polaroid camera with manually settable exposure control. Film costs a bunch, but eh? Life is short, and I'd just spend the money on lenses and other stuff I don't need anyway. ;-) Godfrey -- Godfrey DiGiorgi - godfreydigio...@me.com > On Jul 7, 2014, at 2:15 PM, Darren Addy <pixelsmi...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Seems like Godfrey or someone posted on this before, but I can't find > it by searching. > Does anyone have a tip for testing the functionality of a Polaroid > sx70 camera, in the most frugal way possible? -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
