50 Years Later: a Rebirth for Polaroid's 'Instant Cameras'?
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50 Years Later: a Rebirth for Polaroid's 'Instant Cameras'?
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50 Years Later: a Rebirth for Polaroid's 'Instant Cameras'? (fastcompany.com) 32
Posted by EditorDavid
on Sunday May 01, 2022 @11:34AM from the click-whirrrrr dept.
In 1972, photo prints that developed before your eyes were "downright magical," argues Fast Company — "and still meaningful today."
A new article at Fast Company points out that while Polaroid went bankrupt twice, and stopped making cameras in 2007, "Then an unexpected thing happened: It turned out that even Polaroid couldn't kill Polaroid."
Even as instant photography's eulogies were being written, a band of enthusiasts known as The Impossible Project bought the last Polaroid factory that hadn't been hastily dismantled and started producing film packs again. The task required reformulating its own chemistry from scratch, and it was years until the results reached the vicinity of original Polaroid quality. Fans were very patient.
Eventually, the Impossible Project and Polaroid came under the same ownership, adopted Polaroid as the unified brand, and started making instant cameras again. The new models start at $100 and look a lot like that 1977 OneStep, even when they're adorably miniaturized. It's almost as if Polaroid's years in limbo were a bad dream.... Polaroid and several smaller companies refurbish old models, replacing worn parts and otherwise returning them to optimum performance. Repairing an SX-70 generally involves permanently removing its leather, but replacement skins are available in an array of styles, from the traditional to the psychedelic.
Increasingly, yesteryear's Polaroid cameras are springing back to life in surprising ways. Wisconsin-based Retrospekt not only revives old models, but also encases antique innards in new plastic shells, allowing it to sell branding crossovers such as Malibu Barbie and Pepsi-themed Polaroid cameras. Hong Kong's Mint offers a camera called the SLR670 that's really a restored SX-70 accompanied by a gizmo that plugs into the flash port to allow for manual settings. And Open SX-70 is a project to smarten up the SX-70 by replacing its 1970s circuit board with a tiny Arduino computer.
Other things I learned from the article:
- "Each film pack contained its own battery, so the camera would never run out of juice at an inopportune moment."
- Kodak was forced out of the instant photography market in 1986 by a Polaroid patent infringement suit in which Polaroid won $925 million in damages.
- Edwin Land's "final gambit to revolutionize photography" was 1977's wildly unpopular Polavision instant home movies.
- There's a 1974 ad for the cameras narrated by Laurence Olivier.
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Polaroid was a very good solution to a need. To instantly image a scene. Until Kodak began producing reliable point and shoots, imaging was a very tricky and highly skilled procedure. And expensive. Kodak brought down the cost by producing film that could be developed automatically and reliability with instruments that were largely idiot proof. A nationwide network of developers emerged. If you wish you could get vacation shots developed while on vacation in a few hours. But only Polaroid was instant.-
The advantage of polaroid is ability to have instant physical copy of the image.
Theybare great at parties and wddings as people can have multie copies of the night to take with them.
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and porn without having send film out to be developed...
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That's probably why they made the Polaroid Swinger. [wikipedia.org]
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Swinger produced a small black and white print from messy roll film. I got one around age 12 after reading an advertarticle in some place like Popular Science. The extinction exposure gauge was clever. I don't know the arc of bifurcation of "swinger", between the upbeat Petula Clark aesthetic in 1965-ish mainstream culture, and "Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice" (1969). As a kid with a camera, the Swinger took small expensive pictures of not great quality.
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Or you could just use your phone with one of those mini portable wireless photo printers.
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There are many instant print cameras available.
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Polaroid was a very good solution to a need. To instantly image a scene. Until Kodak began producing reliable point and shoots, imaging was a very tricky and highly skilled procedure. And expensive.
The Brownie was around long before Land introduced his camera; and a quite good camera for its day.
Kodak brought down the cost by producing film that could be developed automatically and reliability with instruments that were largely idiot proof. A nationwide network of developers emerged. If you wish you could get vacation shots developed while on vacation in a few hours. But only Polaroid was instant.
There were reliable, cartridge loading cameras during the Polaroid era; but your point is correct. The instant picture was the draw, and once Polaroid developed a film that did not require you to coat the image after waiting to tear off the cover, they no doubt grew in popularity. The downside is the images were not very fade resistant. I still have my Dad's Polaroid Land Camera from the late 60's.
I suspect the new Polaroid will be a novelty item for fun use, given much amateur photography has been replaced by digital pone based devices. Still would be cool at a party.
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It was not the cartridge it was the machine developing and printing.
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Correct. Cartridge based systems made P&S much similar since there was no film to thread nr did you ruin a roll by opening the back before rewinding. But even before that there were P&S that did just fine. In addition, it was easy to turn a camera into a P&S by setting f stops and shutter speeds to get the desired depth of field and exposure. You could dhot all day if you wanted without making any adjustments.
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To image a scene without having to involve the local 1 hour photo developing service. And perhaps the vice squad.
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is how you get a lot of pollution from a gasoline engine.
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I never figured out why everybody fans themselves Polaroids while they're waiting for them to develop.
Even today: If you take a photo with one of those new "Instax" cameras and give it to a five year old, they'll look at it first then start fanning themselves with it. Instax photos aren't even wet or anything.
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Back in the original Polaroid era, some of the early films required you to "fix" the image by running a fixer sponge over the print, leading to fanning to dry the fixer. Now, it's just an homage to the OG Polaroids.
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Before SX-70, Polaroid films had a negative roll and a positive roll joined by a paper leader. The positive roll had attached foil pods containing the developer goo, to be cracked open and spread by pressure rollers between the negative and positive after the negative was exposed. Pack films kept the separate positive/negative structure and pods, on cut sheet films inside an opaque paper sleeve. After pulling the exposed film through the rollers, wait whatever specified developing time then peel the posi
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The FastCompany article is from 2013.
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I'm waiting for an Open SR-71 [wikipedia.org] project...
(Obviously for after fuel prices go down...)
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...feeling nostalgic & spending their pensions on reminiscing on the past. Then there's the beardy man-bun hipsters who'll buy anything retro. If you want instantly useful images, get a smartphone. They're so many times better quality & more practical than Polaroids.
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There's always one.
Listen, zoomer. Photography is many things. One of those is the aesthetic. Analog photography is a niche market these days, but it hasn't lost its aesthetic.
What's your definition of quality, anyway? PIxel count? Sharpness? Focus? Composition? Lighting? Artistic merit? Communicative effectiveness? Guess which one of those isn't used to grade a photograph.
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With Polaroid?! If you say so, boomer.
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Where's the family album now? When was the last time you looked through one?
Most people keep their family photos on their phone, and a surprisingly amount of them don't take a backup so they're lost when changing phones, I'm guilty of this too.
Sure a smartphone is smarter, faster, cheaper to use for photos, and you can print on a printer or get them printed for you, yet very few use this. Having an extra printer for this is just a major hassle and usually ends up in a thrift store somewhere, and very few use online services to get them printed.
The huge advantage with a Polaroid is that you have a picture - instantly, no computer needed, no download / upload procedure, you easily forget this - but with an instant camera you just take a bunch of pictures at the moment when it counts, and you'll be glad you kept those photos, and it doesn't require that you pull out your phone to show them off.
It has its place, it was the thing that was too useful to die, even when Polaroid thought the game was up, people wouldn't let it die, because it was too much of a good thing.
I hope they bring back the original format, or even bigger - not these small novelty versions that takes microscopic images, but the real deal. I have two of the original cameras myself, one of the traditional ones with flash, and another one with SLR and it's surprisingly fast to focus, and does a heck of a job doing so, it's WAY faster at autofocus than my smartphone, but "Quality" is not why you purchase an Instant camera, you do it because you don't want to fiddle with anything else, just shoot a picture and have it there for the moment - forever.
Long live the Polaroid!
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How about a digital camera that can print also print Polaroids? That way you can get the boast of both world, the cloud and your scrap book.
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I have my dad's SX-70. It's a beautifully made device and so I thought that I should try some
of the Impossible film. As they admitted at the time that the chemistry just isn't available to
produce images equal to the quality of the past. Granted, the artifacts produced are unique
and interesting in their own way, but they are akin to listening to AM radio on a crystal set.
You get something, but don't expect fidelity. If the anomalies are the point, then I
suppose some people would be happy with it. Edwin Land though, would be aghast. -
A human one, that is.
From TFA:
It was not something that had not being done before,...
What does this even mean? Plenty of other embedded cruft that makes reading painful.
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... at least for the masses.
Think about it for a moment.
Despite the instantaneous ability to take a photo, display it and indeed share it - with *anyone* on the planet that has internet access, how many photo's are actually physically stored?I've got family albums of photo's - some are now close on 100 years old.
I have ZERO photo's from about 2005 onward, except randomly scattered in emails or on social media.
I cannot grab an album and go through it from that period onward.We create photo's now at such an incredible rate, they have become meaningless in terms of being collected and stored.
So many of us are guilty of this - we have, hell, enough space on a tiny hand-held device to store thousands of photo's - and we snap and snap and snap away - but for the most part, do NOTHING with them.
We may share them, but we may as well be adding single grains of sand to the Sahara Desert for all the difference it makes.I do wonder whether children or teens now, will have _anything_ in terms of photographic captures, to recall times past, when they hit 30, 40, 60, 80 years old.
Digital is fickle - you can destroy it in a second - you can destroy 100,000 photo's in the snap of a finger.
Destroying 100,000 physical photo's - hell, you'll notice that.
Digital has absolutely killed photography, in terms of a record for the masses.
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Shortly after my 7 year old was born, I set up a Telegram group for the family members so we could share pictures of her amongst the family. Every year, I download all the images and comments, edit out the unnecessary stuff (e.g. "here's a link to a good car-seat"), then print them in a photo-book that I give as Christmas gifts to the family.
I really love that she'll have not just photos of herself when she was little, but also the responses and thoughts of the people who loved her.
I've also hear of people
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