Polaroid Land Camera 180

Polaroid Land Camera 180
image by Graustark (Image rights)

The Polaroid Land Camera 180 looks superficially much like the other folding cameras in the Polaroid 100-400 series. All use the same 3¼×4¼" instant peel-apart instant film. Like Polaroid's higher-end folding models such as the Automatic 250 and 350, the 180 has a metal body with a tripod socket, and similar single-window folding Zeiss rangefinder. So what is different?

First the 180 has a 114mm f/4.5 Tominon lens manufactured by Tomioka, and offers fully manual exposure settings. The aperture settings go from f90 to f4.5 with 18 click stops. The shutter speeds run from 1s to 1/500 with B. The focusing arms also have distance (3.5, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 15, 25 ft and inf.) listed instead of pictograms. On the lensboard a lever selects the flash sync setting, M for bulb or X for electronic flash; "V" is a self-timer setting. An accessory shoe is also mounted on the camera body next to the viewfinder. 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 exposure settings on this camera. The EV numbers can be set at 1/2 EV click stops. Once the correct EV setting has been set, It is very easy to twist both the aperture and shutter dials at the same time to maintain a particular EV number; but it is also easy to set the aperture or shutter independently. The EV scale is similar in concept to that used in the Pathfinder series of instant cameras.