The first of a LOT of chosts attempting to document and explain this guy, something about it really called to me. I'm normally a big film photography guy but this combines my love of Polaroid and hyper-obtuse technology. Anyways let's dive in, first by looking at the camer itself.
I came across this camera on eBay looking for some other weird Polaroid stuff, when I found this listing for a boxed example from an art school liquidating old equipment (most likely the main target demographic for this camera).
At first blush, besides the wacky shape things seem kinda standard-ish. You got a 30mb (Polaroid branded! Hitachi made) compactflash card and a battery holder for 4 AA batteries. After this the silliness begins.
While the battery pack is made for the AA size, it was made for rechargeable cells that should total to 6V 500mA. while AAs (or modern rechargables like eneloops) can fit, they can only discharge at 6V for the start of their life, and the PDC NEEDS all 6V, meaning you get about 7 exposures before the camera powers down. I solved this by getting 2 LiFePo4 cells that are rated at 3.2V and using spacers.
As you can see from the first image, I got both lenses for the PDCs special lens mount. These lenses are of unknown origin, they have no markings that can suggest where they came from. Historically if Polaroid wanted a nice glass lens they would contract out either American Optical co. or Tomiya to make it for them, considering its unmarked I guess AO? (Tomiya stuff was always marked as such) Anyways, you get 11mm (38mm eq) and a 17mm (60mm eq), both lenses are F/2.8. These lenses have a really odd focusing mechanism where the whole lens assembly is sprung(!) and then the camera's mount on the inside pushes against the lens assembly to move it in and out to focus. I think this is a unique implementation of unit focusing on a digital camera.
Speaking of focusing, Polaroid's beloved sonar autofocus makes its return from its massive line of instant cameras. It's just as snappy as the film cameras (except the camera does not move the lens until its taking a photo) and it has the added benefit of displaying the acquired focus distance on the top LCD panel with an accuracy of 0.01m! with the limited button selection on the camera you also have the option to kill the autofocus (for when you're taking a photo through glass) which sets the camera to infinity.
Besides that control you have a button right next to the shutter that gives you a +1.5 stop correction for backlit subjects, a button that disables the very strong integrated flash, and a white balance button that lets you cycle between AWB, incandescent light, and tungsten. Besides that all other buttons are dedicated to naming files, compressing them (we'll get back to that), or disabling its very loud speaker (if you're a sicko you can also set it to display focus in imperial instead of metric).
The fourth image explains where most of the functionality of this camera is hidden, and where it took me so long to get things going.... So the PDC uses SCSI to tether itself to a PC or MAC and unlocks a great deal of manual control over it. However, this port..... it is SCSI, but its in the format of ultra high density 16 pin SCSI which NO ONE ELSE USED. Gravis and I discovered that some laptop floppy drives used the connector, but shorted out some of the lines that broke compatibility. through so sleuthing that i'll explain later I found ANOTHER Polaroid product that used this hell cable that adapts it to a more sensible DB25 connector.
With that I'll leave this post here, and next installment I can show you the trials and tribulations of getting photos off this thing and some cool stuff with that.
