So now we established that the PDC is a bit wacky on the outside, it's time to look inside.
Polaroid advertises the PDC 3000 as a 1 Megapixel camera, on the camera's "NO COMP" setting those files are 1MB each. Yep! these are RAW, except this is in Polaroid's .PDN file format (Polaroid Digital Negative). According to my research sources, this makes PDN one of the first Raw image file formats at least for consumer use. Polaroid made a big fuss about the PDN format and how you could edit the files after the fact. Polaroid claims that the camera can compress PDNs to half their size without loss, and also offers a 5:1 and 10:1 compression with loss. So with the 30mb CF card that shipped with this, you could get creative or just buy more cards.
Big issue - PDNs can only be properly decoded by polaroid software, and only the PDC-3000 used PDN, so there is ONE program that can read these files, and it was made for windows 95-2000 with a Mac release as well (The manual claims that any TWAIN compatible image suite can handle PDN, but in my trials it just gives a teeny image with a fraction of the resolution). You need PDC Direct to make this camera sing (god bless Archive.org somehow has a copy of the software disc saved)
Getting PDC direct to work was a bit of a pain for me, it really only works on windows95-2000, so I eventually got a laptop to be happy emulating 98SE, with an external CF card reader
Inside PDC direct things are fairly normal, with some interesting options. The main menu gives you a preview of all your images, with options to batch transfer to TIFF (the only useful format PDN can convert to), make a contact sheet, and to inspect images and edit "IQA settings"
The IQA settings is kinda wacky, you can specify what MODEL DISPLAY AND PRINTER you are using, presumably it has some presets to modify color to be more accurate (!), and the wackiest of all is that you can set the color profile. As seen in the third image, you can take a photo of an 18% gray card, tell the software where it is in the image and the software calibrates around that, which seems like a very professional workflow to have all these calibration options.
All the other options in the software require the PDC to be tethered to the computer (we will get back to that!!!!)
Finally looking at images, the photos look really good for 97! I've seen what its more expensive contemporaries could do and the PDC can keep up very well. I will add more posts with images from the camera (dunno how to attach more than 4 on cohost), but i'm very impressed with the image quality. While resolution is quite limited, Polaroid's color science did pay off and the colors are very pleasing and true to life.