In the 70s and 80s Polaroid spawned thousands of machines like the one above, creating and dominating the instant ID and passport photo business. Many dozens of variants on the Miniportrait helped establish mom and pop style photo stands all around the world but since the onset of digital, you can find these littering eBay and bargain bins. Hardy, uncomplicated and fairly idiot-proof, these cameras should last longer than instant film itself.

It takes double pictures

The main neat feature about the Miniportrait 202 you can see from its two lenses. Each lens has its own shutter so that means that with one squeeze of that green trigger, it will expose two images on the same print. I'm not sure what the application was back in the day but I believe it was so you could have two instant copies for those documents that required two copies -- all you need are a pair of scissors.

But isn't it more fun to cover one lens, take the picture once, and then cover the other lens and take a different picture to make a photo like this?

Further models have four lenses!!

What is idiot proof exactly?

As usual, this item came from KEH.com without a manual so when I say idiotproof I mean that first I had to waste some expensive Fuji FP-100C before I figured out what the controls all did. That shot above was #7 out of 10. The first three was spent trying to figure out its fixed focus range (1.2ms or 47 inches), and the next few were trying to get proper exposure from its combination of extremely limited shutter speeds and apertures.

EDIT: the most embarrassing thing about this learning process is that I totally missed the second-most awesome feature about this camera. It has a built-in tape measure. A friendly Miniportrait owner clued me into that. So that's what that little tab was below the camera. *slaps forehead*.

The Miniportrait offers:
- B / 60 / 125th of a second exposure
- f8/ f16/ f22

Indoors this is recipe for underexposure but aha, it also has a P/C terminal so that you can plug in a flash or flash trigger. Happily, the one for this unit worked and I was able to sync up a Pocket Wizard and set up a strobe through a white umbrella. I tested exposure with my 30D and shot most of the rest of the film. (Incidentally, for my notes, I found the decent peel apart development time was 90 seconds -- exactly as the Fuji box says).

Here's Jhayne's picture of me:

Just so you know that Polaroid was serious about the potentials of this camera, here is a capture of the manual (which I snagged from an eBay ad).

Future Polaroids

I actually bought this camera so that I could scavenge its pack film back for the Polaroid 600SE outfit that I will be slowly putting together (the other pack film back that came with the 600SE I bought from eBay didn't come with a dark slide -- this one does). It is only slightly more useful than that ProPack I got last summer. I might trot this one out for parties.

UPDATE: I've now acquired a 600SE lens for my 600SE body so my Polaroid portrait project can begin.