Replications From Polaroid’s Palette : Art: By filming expensive artworks with a giant camera, the company can put a color photo reproduction on your wall for $1,500.

Are today’s art prices beyond your budget?

Do you covet a painting that’s not for sale?

Are you reluctant to buy art that would require paying a stiff insurance premium or installing a security system as tight as Ft. Knox’s?

Polaroid Corp. has the answer for you: full-scale, stunningly accurate photographic replicas of fine art.

With the introduction of the Polaroid Custom Replica Service, the giant of instant photography hopes to sell the public on a process that is already well known to elite collectors and museums. As Polaroid sees it, we can all have the pictures of our dreams through the miracle of a giant camera that produces “instant” replicas with far greater accuracy than other methods of reproduction.

Potential customers for the new service include corporate leaders who can replicate official portraits of their company’s founder, so that each branch office can display a likeness of The Great Man, said Norma Pasekoff, director of Polaroid’s Custom Replica Service in Cambridge, Mass. Family squabbles over who gets prized portraits of ancestors can also be solved by replicas, she said.

Museum visitors who fall in love with a particular picture can order a replica from Polaroid, though they must get permission from the museum and pay a royalty. The cost for a replica runs around $1,500 for a 30-x-40-inch image, but drops to about $700 apiece if a client orders five replicas of the same picture. That’s much more than the cost of a standard reproduction or poster, but it sounds like a steal when compared to multimillion-dollar sales in recent auctions.

Using a room-size camera and film that is the same size as the artwork, Polaroid can replicate oils, pastels, watercolors, frescoes and tapestries measuring up to 40x80 inches. The massive Polaroid cameras work quickly, but not as instantaneously as hand-held models, due to a complex process of color matching, Pasekoff said.

The first step is to photograph the original art along with a color calibration chart, she said. A transparency is made of the first shoot, and the resulting image is computer-scanned and color matched. A second, color-corrected transparency is created, and this image is then photographed--producing the final picture. The dramatic moment arrives when two technicians, standing on either side of the sheet of exposed film, peel the back off and reveal the finished picture.

“Electronic imaging allows the picture to be precisely color-matched at over 90,000 points per square inch. Every texture, brush stroke, crack and paint chip in the original is replicated. And, multiple quantities are processed with the same level of precision and control for unprecedented color and image accuracy,” according to a press release.

If the new service catches on, Polaroid will expand a market that has been limited to a few collectors and the museum trade. New clients will discover that they are in prestigious company, however.

No less prominent a private collector than Walter H. Annenberg is an aficionado of photographic replicas, though he hasn’t used Polaroid’s service. The publisher and former Ambassador to Great Britain has installed replicas of artworks based on medical themes in the Annenberg Center in Rancho Mirage, a medical education facility at the Eisenhower Medical Center.

Annenberg’s replicas now number more than 100 and include such renowned paintings as “The Gross Clinic” and “The Agnew Clinic” by Thomas Eakins, “The Miracle of Christ Healing the Blind” and “The Burial of Count Orgaz” by El Greco, “Portrait of Dr. Gachet” by Vincent van Gogh and Rembrandt’s “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp,” as well as graphics by Leonardo da Vinci and Thomas Rowlandson.

No one would mistake these glossy copies for the real thing, but the subject matter is so appropriate that medical specialists who attend lectures and symposia at the center are unlikely to complain. Annenberg himself is so pleased with the replicas that he shows them off to art aficionados who travel to his desert estate to see his art collection--which is currently at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Among Polaroid’s museum clients, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu has used replicas to document the exact condition of “Mythological Subject” by Dosso Dossi and “Portrait of the Marquesa de Santiago” by Francisco Goya before these prized paintings were treated in the museum’s conservation lab. The replicas proved to be a valuable tool because they reproduced the paintings in their actual size, recording color and brushwork with “incredible accuracy,” according to Getty conservator Yvonne Szafran. “We would love to own a camera like that, but Polaroid doesn’t sell them,” she said.

The Boston Museum of Fine Arts has used Polaroid replicas more extensively than any other museum, partly because of its proximity to Polaroid’s office in Cambridge, Mass.

On one occasion, a Boston curator discovered that collectors were much more willing to loan masterpieces to a Monet exhibition if they could temporarily fill the empty space in their homes with replicas, so Polaroid did the job. Replicas also were used to document before and after stages when the museum cleaned its own Monet collection.

A current project at Polaroid entails replicating John Singleton Copley’s 1773 portrait, “Mrs. Daniel Sargent,” from the collection of the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco. The subject of the painting, Mary Turner Sargent, was the great-granddaughter of John Turner, a prominent political figure who in 1668 built the House of Seven Gables in Salem, Mass.

Revered as the site of a Nathaniel Hawthorne novel and the last 17th-Century wood mansion remaining in the United States, the house is now a museum. When the replicated portrait is complete, it will hang in the house along with other family portraits.