Polaroid 900 Electric Eye

[Mainecoonmaniac]

My wife gave me a box of his dad's old cameras years ago. It included a gem of a Zeiss Super Ikonta IV and a Polaroid 900. The camera is fully functional, but no film is made for it any more. I'm toying with the idea of converting it to a 4x5 camera. What are your thoughts?

Thanks in advance!

 

[Truzi]

Why not? It should be fun, and you'd have a nice 4x5 camera.

I've a Polaroid "The 800" that was my great grandmother's. I have occasionally used it with some 4x5 film by loading & unloading in a changing bag, which is annoying, and it does not cover the full area of the film. However, I am somewhat reluctant to modify it.

Something to consider is sentimental value. For me, the sentimental value prevents me from widening the film gate and replacing the bellows to get full 4x5, and cutting to make the backs fit; I'm reluctant to do any mods that cannot be reversed (though may do so at some point). On the other hand, I'd be more likely to use it often if it were modified. The front standard is removable, so I'd have no reservations about a donor lens from another Polaroid with better options (like a 110b). Also, The 800 does not have a combined rangefinder/viewfinder (I'm not sure about the 900), though this may not be important to you.

I have found some of the correct film on ebay, but it's an expensive hit-or-miss. Oddly, some of the older rolls (pre-1966) produced images about 40% of the time, while those made in the 80s were completely dry. If you have money to waste you may want to try that just for fun before you convert.

The Byron conversion always seemed to interest me:
http://salihonbashome.blogspot.com/p/byron-conversion-service.html

 

[Mainecoonmaniac]

Hi Truzi. Thanks for the wonderful and helpful response. You've given me some encouragement. I saw from the website that the lens is not the original. I wonder if using a different lens will make the rangefinder useless? Or using the same focal length lens will make the rangefinder accurate. I think this is a long term project. The camera is pretty much unused.

 

[Truzi]

I really don't know much about this (only what I've read online). Your lens is original to your camera; so long as the film plane does not change when you convert to 4x5, there should be no problem (though you would want to test to make sure everything is correct).

Using a different lens will require you focus with ground-glass (and perhaps put a focusing scale on the bed), and/or recalibrate the rangefinder (the Byron site discusses this, especially under a link for grinding a cam).

There are various "how-to" pages on the web from people who have done this conversion themselves. There used to be some how-to pages for the Byron (I've not checked in a while, but I imagine they are still available).

Another conversion is the Razzle, but I don't know if it exists anymore.

There is also the Alpenhause:
http://www.alpenhause.com/index.htm
You've probably seen a classified here on APUG for one of those: (there was a url link here which no longer exists)

However, I get the impression you may want to do this yourself, as opposed to buying a pre-converted camera or sending yours off for conversion.

 

[paul_c5x4]

Another conversion is the Razzle, but I don't know if it exists anymore.

There is also the Alpenhause.

Razzle is no more - (there was a url link here which no longer exists) - A shame really as he did some very nice conversions. I liked his solution for a ground glass and the slimline spring back. Much nicer than the coil springs used on the Alpenhause conversion.

The Byron conversion also has a few neat ideas - The quick-change lens mount is something that I've been looking at with a view to adapting it when I get round to doing an 800 conversion. The cam would be specific to just one lens though unless some mechanising could be added to select different cams for each lens. Byron has some notes about adjusting the rangefinder and re-profiling the cam which i need to read up on again.

 

[Truzi]

The cam would be specific to just one lens though unless some mechanising could be added to select different cams for each lens.

I've been trying to dream up something for this, but the basic conversion is likely beyond my skills - let alone grinding a single static cam. A multi-cam mechanism is no more than a mental exercise for me.

 

[Mainecoonmaniac]

Has anybody heard of a Littman 45?

http://www.mikekobal.com/the-man-behind-littman-45-single-opus-arte-collection-william-littman/

 

[paul_c5x4]

I think there was some debates about Littman and his business model, and threads here got moderated or locked fairly quickly.

Google "littman polaroid conversion patent" if you want the gory details.

 

[Mainecoonmaniac]

I do hot yoga

I think there was some debates about Littman and his business model, and threads here got moderated or locked fairly quickly.

Google "littman polaroid conversion patent" if you want the gory details.

But this smells like a Bikram Choudry type of patent. Polaroid has been around and someone decided to patent the conversion. Yoga has been around for over 1000 years, Bikram Choudry copywritten a sequence of poses.

 

[1L6E6VHF]

I have used and still own a Polaroid 900 Electric Eye camera.

Its lens is not a fast multielement professional lens like those on the Pathfinders, 180 and 195. It's more like the lenses on the older Polaroids.

Not to say that the 900 lacked neat features. The 900 set both the aperture and the shutter speed (perhaps one of the earliest consumer cameras with program AE - though the term did not exist yet). Its replacement, the pack-loading Automatic 100 was only aperture-priority with only two choices of aperture. The 900 had single-window range/viewfinder, you had to wait until late 1967 (the 250) to get that in a pack camera.
The 900 also had a fully variable manual exposure control (though you were limited to exposure settings along the program curve, set by exposure value, with no independent control of shutter and aperture)
I always thought the roll film cameras made fewer pictures ruined by missing corners or uneven development (because the paper path across the back of the camera assured the pull was straight at the rollers where it mattered).

One more thing: The 900 was also compatible with electronic flash - even had instructions on how to use electronic flash in the owner's manual. The pack cameras' instruction books warned not to try using them with electronic flash. Using a simple electronic flash (high trigger voltage) in my 250 produced a spark inside that put blue areas in the picture. A Vivitar 283 (low trigger voltage) did not have that problem, but it was an uneasy kludge. The flash also fired before the shutter was completely open, slightly graying one side of the picture.