My Newest Camera + Broken Polaroid Camera Tip

Barbie Polaroid 600 / Impossible Color 600 Gold Frame
My newest camera (well technically, second newest: I got the Instax 210 the same day) A test photo (a boring photo taken in the rain, but I was desperate to make sure the camera worked!)

Long story short (just kidding, it’s still going to be long.), I’d been wanting this camera forever but online, the Barbie Polaroid Camera was $50 - that’s way too much to spend on a camera that I already had at least two of, that does the exact same things this one does. (That $50 would feed those 2 cameras and develop a roll of film.)

My lovely step-mama and I were checking out some antique stores when I came across it and made a sound she described as if I had seen a demon. I ended up not leaving the store with it.
By the time I got to her house, I’d regretted my decision. I thought about it all week, and by the following Saturday, I went into the store, all the way up to the third floor, and there it was, right where I had left it.

It was in near perfect condition - the previous owner had stuck the flower stickers that came with it all over the camera (these have sense been removed), but the camera itself was clean, the rollers looked good, hell, the plastic sticker things that everyone loves peeling off their new electronics were still over the face and the Barbie logo. It had to work. So I bought it.

I got home. It was time to test it. I grabbed my used, but still working Impossible 600 cartridge, loaded it up with some shots and the black card, and put it in the camera, sure that it would spit out the card, and all 8 shots, one at a time as I pressed the shutter.

Nothing. No whiirrrrr, no black card spitting out, no little green light flashing, indicating that the flash was charged and ready to shoot. I literally almost cried.

I tried to find anything online that would help and everything basically said “Blah blah you’re battery pack is dead” or “blah blah, it’s your pickarm”. This was definitely not the case for me - my cartridge worked in my other 600 cameras, and my pick arm looked just the same as them too. But then I noticed the difference -

I looked inside my camera. There’s two battery contacts that should be parallel to each other, completely straight side my side. My left contact was shifted inward at an angle to the other. I took a pencil and gently pushed it back in place. I popped the cartridge in.

SUCCESS!!!

I got that stupid Barbie Polaroid camera to work.

There are two morals to this unnecessarily long story:

1. If your Polaroid 600 isn’t working, and you’ve tried everything, it could be something as simple as the battery contact was a tiny bit out of whack.

2. If you see something you want that makes you squeal like you just saw some kind of terrible demon, you should probably buy it.