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by PartiallyTyped 1017 days ago
I don't think you understand the selling point of these.

An ex of mine had a Polaroid, and had taken hundreds of pictures with friends and family, all cherished and passed to loved ones.

There's something special and somehow human about small, candid, imperfect photos that hits just right on memory lane and evokes nostalgia. It's more than just what it presents, it's about what it represents, and about the experience itself.

It stops being just a photo. Looking at it and going down memory lane is an experience in and of itself. You get to live that with your eyes, your fingers, your ears, and your nose even, and at the same time you can share them with others. At the same time you evoke the feelings and experiences from when you took it.

Every time you look at that picture you don't just remember what it depicts, you also experience every other time you experienced it.

That's just something no digital photo will ever be able to capture.

3 comments

Personally I've never had a problem re-experiencing events from digital photos. Often more so, because I take a good handful and get a sequence rather than just a single snap.

Aside from that - how did your ex manage to avoid fading?

Polaroids are absolutely notorious for yellow-fade. And the chemistry is weird and fragile.

It takes a month or so for the photo to fix. If you do anything to it in that time - cut off the white edges, squeeze it an album, expose it to light - the fading happens even more quickly.

The fading is a feature, not a bug, if you are the type of person that relates to what I described above, but in all seriousness, I don't remember.
> Maybe we should think of memory itself as an art form, in which the real work begins as soon as the paint hits the canvas. And a work of art is never finished, only abandoned.

https://www.thedictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/concept/klexos

I have a special place in my heart for the dictionary of obscure sorrows :')

I do understand that there's a niche market for this. Though honestly, thinking all the R&D costs, that niche market (which gets even smaller with that price tag) can't offset those costs.