Polaroid Type 87

Type 87 was Polaroid's high-speed black and white peel-apart, square format, ISO 3000, introduced in 1974 in the 80-series pack. It was the first coaterless pack film Polaroid ever shipped, which meant you could peel and walk away without the cotton swab and protective coating step earlier types demanded. Development ran about 30 seconds at room temperature, with an image area of roughly 3.25 by 3.375 inches inside the 80-series geometry.

The film was the square sibling of Type 667. Same emulsion family, same speed, same chemistry, trimmed to the smaller frame for the Square Shooter and Zip cameras. ISO 3000 in 1974 was a serious number. Photojournalists working dark interiors, copy-stand operators, forensic technicians, and anyone needing flash-free indoor proofs picked Type 87 over slower color stock because the speed was genuinely useful. Contrast runs higher than Tri-X by a noticeable margin, with shadows compressing fast and a hard punch in the midtones that reads as documentary rather than pictorial.

Polaroid quietly dropped Type 87 in the late 1990s as the 80-series cameras aged out. It came back in 2003 in a professional-market reintroduction, with pack capacity bumped from 8 to 10 exposures. That revival lasted three years. Polaroid discontinued the format permanently in 2006, and Fujifilm's parallel FP-3000B in the 100-series 3.25 by 4.25 size carried the high-speed instant role until Fuji discontinued it at the end of 2013.

Surviving packs are 20-plus years old at minimum. Expired Type 87 fogs and loses contrast unpredictably depending on storage. Refrigerated stock from a working studio archive can still produce usable prints; room-temperature attic finds usually cannot.

Reciprocity exponent is 1.0, the correct value for an instant film of this generation. Zone Light Meter applies the long-exposure correction past one second; on this film that correction is zero. With ISO 3000 stock, you are almost never in the long-exposure regime anyway, so reciprocity stays mostly an edge case.