I still have a working SX-70, or at least working when I last used it. It sits on the shelf with my Canon FT 35mm. Useless, but I hate to give them up.
I first used a Polaroid when my uncle had one of the early black & white models. It was quite a luxury, but he justified the cost since he needed quick pics for insurance adjusting. He sometimes sent me out into the field as a kid to take shots of accident locations and suchlike.
Later, the Polaroid became a useful tool for school news photography. Before the Polaroid and before I built my own darkroom, we had to wait several days to get our sports shots back from the drugstore. Newspaper deadlines were hard to make, so the school bought a Polaroid.
It cost a lot to make a single shot, the camera was almost as bulky as a 4x5 Speed Graphic, but we loved it.
The SX-70 was bulky, too, but at least you didn’t have to wipe a chemical fixer on the print to keep it from fading. I found out that strange images appeared if you set something down on the film while it was self-developing. Once a UFO appeared when I set my keys on it.
The image quality wasn’t super, and the cost per image about $1, but the color was pretty good. I still have a lot of them in my basement and they have faded very little when kept out of sunlight and air.
How long will it be until digital cameras are similarly obsolete?
I saw on the news that Polaroid was closing its last 2 manufacturing plants.
A spokesman said, Polaroid will now be going into digital photography.
Wow, that’s cutting edge huh? Perhaps they can form a panel that will investigate the viability of horseless carriages?
You know what would be cool? A digital camera with a tiny inkjet printer built into it.
Actually, the original Polaroid Corporation went Chapter 11 precisely because they didn’t get into the digital market. (The current Polaroid Corporation is a subsidiary of one of their old creditors which bought up all their stuff.)
I don’t know how they plan to enter the market now – it’s completely saturated. Unless they’re planning on doing cool digital instant-printing stuff like I mentioned.
Ah, yes…the Mavica. Had to be made big because the floppies weren’t small. We still have a Mavica in our (real estate) office, but only one computer can read the discs and everyone has picture phones anyway, so it just sits, waiting to be checked out and sent on a mission to a mansion.
The first digital still cam I had was a Casio QV11A. It originally was priced at $1000, had internal memory only, no flash, and took lousy pictures, but I don’t remember the resolution (probably 320x200). I waited until the price came down to $300 ca. 1997, and used it to take these. I think it had a RS232 output as well as (advanced for its time) a NTSC output.
My favorite Polaroid camera memory: taking pictures of the television set during the live broadcast of the first Moon landing.
BTW, I saw news of this on CNN, who said that instant photography made “Polaroid” a household word. That’s not how I remember it. I thought they got famous with Polaroid brand polarizing sunglasses, the ones that stop glare, first. That was the reason for naming the company Polaroid. If anybody has more specific info on the order in which Polaroid got famous for these two things, please chime in!
This has some sentimental significance to me, because Edwin Land (the founder of Polaroid and the reason they called early instant cameras “Land Cameras”) invented an inexpensive process for making polarizing filters by stretching plastic, and he did so in the company of a mutual friend (I never met Land himself, though). In fact, I have a small, brittle old roll of this plastic sheet from his first successful batch, made with his own hands. It’s one of my few mementos of the mutual friend, who died years ago.
That’s a great idea! The printer is selling for $30, but I can’t find the paper for sale. This link talks about it:
It looks a lot like a hybrid idea between digital, thermal and SX-70 technology.
For $.20/sheet and $30 for the printer, and if it works with any digital cam with a USB output as it claims, I’ll get a bunch of those for stocking stuffers.
I know Canon and Sony have both made pocket-sized (well, overcoat-pocket-sized anyway) printers that you can connect your camera to and print a postcard-size photo. I wouldn’t be surprised if Epson has made one as well.
The main problem is paper size. The size that most people want for their prints is a lot bigger than what most people want for their camera.
Ah, yes…the Mavica. I had to borrow it from another office when I wanted to use it, and I wanted hi-res photos for print, and the 3.5" floppies could store exactly ONE hi-res shot.
I’m going to guess “Quite a while”. Surely the desire to capture and save images is not going away. It’s difficult to see how this would be done in future without the use of digital techniques. (Does any glimmer of a non-digital alternative exist today?)
Contrary to poular belief, POLAROID didn’t die because it stuck with instant phtography. Polaroid was well on the way toward developing a line of digital cameras. The real problem was: the company bet $2.5 billion on a new medical imaging system, which was to compete with IBM. It had some very innovative features, but nobody bought it-meanwhile, as digital photography took off, profits from the film cameras dropped off. the, they brought in a new CEO (from Black and Decker)-Gary DiCamillio. This guy knew all about selling toasters, but nothing about photograpy. He blew a wad of cash on instant film printing kiosks-which would be placed in shoping malls. Nobody bought them-another $1 billion squandered. So, tons of money lost, with no saleable products-result, bankruptcy
Right here at my desk I have an Olympus C-211 Zoom, manufactured in the year 2000. It’s a full-featured digital camera that also prints to Polaroid 500 film. I used it many times over the years to take a photo of someone, give them a copy on the spot, and use the digital image for whatever publication I was working on at the time.
It actually takes very good photos (much better than it’s 2mp resolution would suggest) but I guess there was never much of a market for it.
And it’s almost impossible to find Polaroid 500 film anymore.
Polaroid first became famous because Edwin Land developed Polaroid polarizing film. Before he made that, you were forced to use crystal polarizers or Bewster Reflections or something like that. Land’s polaroid film could be made arbitrarily large, and was a lot cheaper and less bulky than other means. Originally he used polyvinyl alcohol films with absorbing meadia mixed in and pelled to align the elements. Later they developed other methods. Polaroid not only sold polarizing films, they also came up with new uses for them, including high quality 3D viewers and the like. Land also pushed a scheme for putting polarizers on all automobile headlights so that drivers wouldn’t blind each other, but that never took off.
The instant photography came along later. (And there’s no connection to polarization in that, so it makes sense). Land worked out the details quickly and presented the idea, wordlessly, at (IIRC) the 1948 meeting of the Optical Society. Later they came up with the SX-70 system that didn’t require pulling off an upper sheet and coating it (although the labrotory Polaroids still did require that).
Polaroid cameras also embraced a variety of optical innovations. Some of their stuff was utterly amazing – clever focussing, plastic lenses, variable-focus lenses, sonic range finding, and the like.
Land tried to get into the instant motion picture film market, with instant-developing movie film called PolaVision. But it was a doomed system – videotape was already around, easier to use, didn’t require developing, and only needed to be made customer-friendly.
Polaroid had a LOT of work done on digital cameras, but they weren’t positioned to market it as a consumer item. They leaned heavily to specialty digital cameras with huge formats and the like. There’s no fundamental reason they couldn’t have gone after the average consumer market, and done it much earlier, but they didn’t, and I really do think it contributed to their demise.
Their medical0imaging system, called Apollo, was pretty impressive. I built some test equipment for it. Nothing else on the market was quite like it. You could input any sort of digital format – X0rays, MRI, what have you, and their system would “write” the image onto a special “film” using a writing head with four miniature lasers that gave extraordinary resolution. The finished “print” looked like a standard X-ray, with no resolution artifacts. Polaroid liked the fact that they would make their money on selling packs of the “film”, since that’show they made their money from their instant cameras. But the system didn’t catch on, and they sold the line to another company, where it apparently died.
They spent a lot of time and effort on it, but I don’t know that it killed their company – they still had most of their plants turning out regular product. And I think that, if they’d gotten into the mass-market consumer digital camera market earlier – as they easily could have – they’d still be around.
My kids’ dad loves his Polaroid camera. Now he’ll have to get one of those new-fangled ones!