With all the whining and complaining I read in this thread, it's a wonder that any of you call yourselves "film enthusiasts" at all.
The Impossible Project has done what no one else did: They brought Polaroid integral instant film back from the dead. At $2.30 per exposure, the price isn't cheap but it's not all that far out of bounds compared to original Polaroid integral film ... It used to cost $.70-$.85 per exposure when it was last made and, accounting for inflation, if it had stayed in production it would have been $1.25-$1.50 now. So a dollar premium for having to completely re-invent it in a ridiculously short period of time and then sell it in volumes barely approaching 1/20th of what Polaroid film sold in back in the day isn't all that bad.
Quality and consistency could certainly be a lot better, but not even Polaroid could make the original film any more ... the materials to do so are no longer available even if you had all the formulations, etc. The Impossible Project's B&W films (a product never even made by Polaroid for integral film cameras, btw) are really quite good and very consistent as of two-three years ago, and their latest color films are passably good quality and consistent. Lots of work yet to do, but remember it took Polaroid 20 years to devise integral films (and $2B dollars) where TIP has struggled with doing the same job in a quarter the time and at 20% of that funding.
While I fight with the TIP films occasionally and have to work hard to get results I'm after sometimes, I don't see any point to saying that TIP is a failure or not producing the goods. I've worked through close to 2000 exposures now and gotten many many excellent photographs from these films with my original and upgraded Polaroid cameras, and with the Impossible I-1 camera as well, so I laud their efforts and integrity.
Frankly, if I wanted excellent photographs and no struggles at all, I'd dump all this old film junk completely and concentrate exclusively on any good modern digital camera for my picture taking. But I enjoy working with film, with all its diverse expressions, inconsistencies, inherent weaknesses, and defects. In many ways, it's those things which make film photography still worth pursuing.
