The folks at Impossible, the German company that’s produced film for Polaroid cameras for the last five years, sent an email out to customers last week announcing they were downsizing their North American operation and had closed offices in Japan and China as well. The company’s CEO, Creed O’Hanlon, pointed to Impossible’s development of a new camera and a sharpened focus on film research and development in explaining the layoffs. “To afford to do so, we have had to re-assess our global presence.” O’Hanlon went on to say “while more people than ever are using Polaroid-format instant photography, driven by the wider availability of refurbished cameras and big strides in the quality of Impossible’s Color and B&W films, we still have some way to go to surpass the beauty, stability and real instantaneity of Polaroid’s original films.”

In July 2013, Impossible founder Florian “Doc” Kaps announced his retirement from the company and a month later, Impossible  halted film production for a time due to persistent quality issues. Since then, the company has released optimized color and black-and-white films with reduced development times and better tonal ranges.

“Our largest investment of both time and money has been – and must continue to be – in the development of our faster-processing, next generation films, as well as in the design of new cameras that will sustain the relevance of these films for a new generation of photographers,” O’Hanlon wrote in the email.” Impossible is becoming much leaner, but more efficient. We are returning to the basics of a smaller, more communal and manageable scale of a start-up – which, when all is said and done, Impossible still very much is.”

I know first-hand to be downsized, laid off, let go–pick your poison–sucks. There’s no getting around that fact. It’s also a fact the folks at Impossible USA have always treated me right when I had a question about their film or an order I had placed. Always.

Another inescapable fact is that Impossible films continue to be temperamental, unpredictable, and unstable. For instance, take their Spectra black-and-white film. It’s probably one of the company’s fastest developing films and comes closest to rivaling the dearly departed Polaroid film in that category. It renders a nice tonal range with deep blacks and holds detail in the highlights. But after a couple of months, that cool, rich tonality shifts to a warm yellow-sepia. And Impossible still suggests dialing down the Polaroid camera’s exposure wheel at least one-third (indicating continuing ISO issues with their films), and to shade the film as it ejects from the camera, suggesting their opacity layer still isn’t fully fleshed out. So when Impossible’s O’Hanlon wrote “…we still have some way to go to surpass the beauty, stability and real instantaneity of Polaroid’s original films,” I get why those layoffs were made (the CEO should have added “simplicity ” to that lofty list of goals but that might be asking a bit much from someone using “instantaneity” in their copy).

Now all he has to do is deliver the goods.