Polaroid Land Camera 180

Polaroid Land Camera 180
image by Graustark (Image rights)

The Polaroid Land Camera 180 looks just like any other folding camera in the Polaroid 100-400 series. They use the same film. Also having similar metal bodies, with tripod sockets and similar folding Zeiss viewfinders of the higher end models like the Automatic 250 and 350. So what is different?

First the 180 has a 114mm f/4.5 Tominon lens manufactured by Tomioka with a fully manual exposure settings. The aperture settings go from f90 to f4.5 with 18 click stops. The shutter speeds is from 1s to 1/5000 with B. Also on the lens is an EV window with settings from 5 to 22 EV. The design of the lens rings make it easy to use EV on this camera. The EV numbers can be set at 1/2 EV click stops. It is very easy to twist both the aperture and shutter dials at the same time to preserve EV numbers. Once the correct exposure has been set, it is rather simple to increase or decrease the shutter / aperture settings to see the difference in exposure value. The camera was made similar in concept to the Pathfinder series of instant cameras.