The Impossible Project has built an unlikely (if not, um, impossible) business on top of the ashes of the iconic but now defunct Polaroid empire. Their reconstituted version of Polaroid’s instant film has been commercially available—and has sold well—for some time now. They also operate a studio in New York City where customers can get large-scale portraits of themselves taken on instant film; the studio doubles as a shop for rentals and retail sales of refurbished vintage Polaroid cameras and other instant photography paraphernalia. It’s pretty impressive.

The company’s first original product is interesting too: Instant Lab is a US$199 device that transfers Instagram photos to real world, analog instant film prints. You put your iPhone in one end and a pack of Impossible Project film in the other end, and voila, a pretend Polaroid photograph becomes a real world Polaroid-esque photo print (a free app controls exposure time). The dizzyingly meta implications and reality-questioning implications aside, the idea is pretty smart. More at the-impossible-project.com.