Before the advent of digital cameras, if you wanted to take a few photos without having to get a whole roll of film developed, you’d use some form of instant camera. The Polaroid 630 SL Lightmixer that [Odd Tinkering] is looking at in a recent video is a good example of a late-80s, early-90s instant camera. As a mass-market product he got it slightly broken for $10, figuring it’d make for an interesting repair and restoration project.
Unlike the 1970s instant cameras that still used plenty of metal and such for the housing and mechanisms, this 600-series camera is pretty much an all-plastic affair. Produced much like the practically identical Lightmixer 630 between 1986 and 1992 it’s clearly designed for easy assembly, with plastic clips holding the whole affair together.
The symptoms for this sold-as-broken machine mostly pertained to issues with the trigger button and it taking shots by itself. This issue along with the flash not working turned out to be just due to corrosion on some connectors, but just getting to these parts required many hours of frustrating prying and trying not to break plastic. Somewhere along in all that violence the internal switch – consisting of a piece of bent copper strip – for the flash also ended up being broken.
With said broken strip patched and brazed back together, the corrosion cleaned and the outer shell’s paint having received a touch up, it works and looks pretty much as it would have back around 1990. You can even still get 600-series film for it today, as the retro-nostalgia factor seems to keep drawing people back to these machines, with newer models still being produced in various guises.
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This articles is written by : Nermeen Nabil Khear Abdelmalak
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