Polaroid colourpak II to large format

I have an old edition (1995) of Amateur Photographer magazine (UK) which describes how a Polaroid Colourpak II was converted into a 5x4 camera for £5 (~$8) . The lens/shutter part was sawn off and attached to a home made body/back. This looks one of the most interesting DIY projects that I have seen and the resulting image looked OK but this was cheap magazine reproduction.

I am tempted to have a go myself but wonder what sort of quality one could expect from the early seventies 'mass consumer' type models (colourpak, Swinger etc). If all I am likely to end up with is a Holga type image then I may as well just buy a Holga!

L

As far as I'm aware the type 80 size is smaller than 4x5 so you might well get holga-like vignetting but the lens might be quite good quality so it should be mostly sharp unlike a holga image.

Having researched this a little more, I think the achilles heel of the project is that the lens in a colourpak II and similar cameras is a fixed f9 aperture which is not going to give a decent depth of field in 5 x 4 format.

L