Polaroid

[xoxoxoBruce]

Bye, bye, Polaroid.

You've given me much pleasure, over the years, old friend.

[Elspode]

Okay, I'm part of the problem. I haven't shot a Poloroid picture in eons, but man, in the day...they definitely made the money off of me and mine. My folks had one of the collapsible bellows types when I was a wee lad, and I had my own Swinger model and later, an SX 70. A large portion of my honeymoon pics were taken with that SX 70 (especially the naughty ones) when I got married the first time.

Sometime in the early 90's, I found a really nice camera at a thrift store for a buck. It looked practically unused. Even then, I had to hunt down the film for it, but I had a blast shooting with it for a few months.

What will most of us older folks remember most about Poloroid products? For me, it will be the smell of the stop bath/preservative stuff you had to smear on the pics after you peeled off the paper to reveal the nearly-developed photo. That, and watching the image slowly coalesce into wholeness after the thing was spit out the front of the more modern models.

[glatt]

We had a couple Polaroid cameras at work for department parties, just for fun, lying around on tables. Last time I tried to buy film for them, around two years ago, the only film I could find by shopping around at several stores was expired and covered with a layer of dust.

[Shawnee123]

Awww...my dad always had the state of the art gizmos when we were young, and he took a lot of pictures on his polaroid cameras. He had one like this for a time:

[SteveDallas]

Ahhhh memories... this was my first camera. Mom agreed to buy it at a garage sale. According to landlist.org, where I grabbed this picture, it wasn't produced after 1970. I must have gotten mine in 1978 or 1979--possibly even in 1980. I took some nice pictures with it (I wonder where they all went??) but I was limited to outdoors. By that time it wasn't easy to find the black & white film it took, and the flashbulbs were absolutely impossible.

[Elspode]

Yup. Those were the two kinds I had. And here's the third.

[tw]

The story of Polaroid is the story of Dr Land. The Land camera was named in his honor. Dr Land studied vision and optics. For example, some of his early experiments defined how vision works - the various parts of a brain that process vision differently.

Polaroid did virtually no innovation in the past 20 years. Its last innovation was ultrasonic range finding developed in conjunction with Texas Instruments. It may take that long for stifled innovation to eventually affect spread sheets. Where are these bean counters that 20 years ago started Polaroid's demise? Rich?

I've recently disassembled my old Polaroid MP-3A Land Camera (an industrial copy camera), that I've had stored away for many years, to ready it for disposal. It's 38" trangular [6"x4"x4"] column and light bank tubings are all aluminum and will be recycled. I'll save the Rodenstock lens [75mm, F 4.5-22] with Polaroid Prontor shutter [B+1-1/125 sec.] as memorabilia. I don't have a picture of it and this image was all I could find with a quick web search; but, it gives you an idea as to what it looked liked. It was like a scanner of its day:

[Cicero]

M'ph.

I have 2 polaroids. This is saaad. I think i'll go stock up on the last film at Walgreens. It's expensive film.....(for me)
Of course I still use a tape deck too....

[BigV]

It's baaaa-aaaack!

Instant Digital Prints (and Polaroid Nostalgia)

By ANNE EISENBERG
Published: April 13, 2008

MILLIONS of families once snapped Polaroid photographs and enjoyed passing around the newly minted prints on the spot, instead of waiting a week for them to be developed.

Now, Polaroid wants to conjure up those golden analog days of vast sales and instant gratification — this time with images captured by digital cameras and camera phones.

This fall, the company expects to market a hand-size printer that produces color snapshots in about 30 seconds.

Beam a photograph from a cellphone to the printer and, with a gentle purr, out comes the full-color print — completely formed and dry to the touch.

The printer, which connects wirelessly by Bluetooth to phones and by cable to cameras, will cost about $150. The images are 2 inches by 3 inches, the size of a credit card. The new printers are so lightweight that a Polaroid executive demonstrating them recently had three tucked unnoticeably into various pockets of his trim jacket, whipping them out as if he were Harpo Marx.

Now this is cool. I have a decent camera in my phone, and I do take my phone with me more places than I take my camera. I can see a market for this. All the kids with a penchant for "retro" can now get a, omg, *physical* print of the picture! How quaint!

[Cicero]

I wish, but it is still digital. I don't like my polaroids just because they are instant.

I don't think it's the same. At all....


Although the instant prints are neat-o...

[Flint]

Part of me wants to say they should build a camera with the printer already in it, but that's not a rational thought. Having a small peripheral printer device is much smarter for a variety of reasons. But, still... wouldn't it be cool if they made a digital polaroid with the printer attached?

[Happy Monkey]

The LCD screen could show the colors slowly fading in as the printer did its work, and spat it out when it was done.

[SteveDallas]

It wouldn't be compelte without a digital squeegee you'd wipe over the picture to make sure all the photons were lined up right.

[tw]

Originally Posted by SteveDallas

It wouldn't be compelte without a digital squeegee you'd wipe over the picture to make sure all the photons were lined up right.

Can a digital squeegee create a high like the original Polaroid one did?