This is the kind of story that can form the basis of a company’s identity and, with any luck, the plot of a biopic that ends up being fictionalized. Brands that dominate certain technologies can take bold and risky steps into the great unknown and lead their industries into the future.
It’s a great story when it’s successful.
When you don’t, having the courage to grab the brass ring of a new technology can hold your company back for years. That’s why you’ve probably forgotten about the Polaroid Polavision camera. And Polaroid’s likely reference point resurrected the instant camera into an ironic, kitschy zombie existence that only seems to rub salt in the wounds of its late 70s attempts to redefine home movies. This is a recent license agreement.
Polavision was touted as Polaroid’s biggest and most important innovation ever, having been in development for over a decade. Just as the company pioneered instant cameras, it was also entering the ’80s as a leader in instant video. That was the plan, anyway. Polavision is a unique film production system consisting of a handheld camera, a film cartridge, and a proprietary viewer that processes the film (using a new type of color addition process that allows for instant development) and displays what is shot. It was. . Polaroid co-founder Edwin Rand thought of Polavision as a kind of personal crusade. Despite some internal resistance (primarily from Polaroid president Bill McCune), Rand announced the camera at Polaroid’s 1977 annual shareholder meeting, and it hit store shelves the same year, with an ad featuring many of the photos. was supported by bad tennis and aging Hollywood legends like Danny Kaye.
But the problem was clear from the beginning. Each film cartridge could only capture about two and a half minutes of footage. Also, I couldn’t capture sound. Because of the slow film speed, each “movie” required an enormous amount of light to successfully process the image. It worked fine outdoors during the day. The colors were grainy and muted, and there was a lot of “noise” in the image, but I could generally understand what was going on. However, indoor footage was often so muddy that I forgot to shoot anything at night without a Krieg light.
Despite its novelty, Polavision failed to capture the imagination of consumers in the way Polaroid’s instant camera did, and sales were low initially. To make matters worse, Victor and Sony were already trying to introduce primitive versions of video cameras in the early 1980s. Even the earliest formats outperformed Polavision in picture quality, recording time, and ability to capture sound.
“Polaroid was the absolutely dominant company in the 2020s.th century,” says Popular Science host Kevin Lieber. retro tech video series. “They had a lead in instant photography and thought the next big thing was going to be home movies. That was the Polavision camera. It was a very ambitious move into video.” And it failed. It’s really terrible. It went bankrupt within two years, seen as the watershed for the company’s ultimate downfall. ”
Still, for enthusiasts like Lieber, having a working Polavision camera is something of a holy grail, as it was for Edwin Land. However, due to the complexity of not only the films themselves, but also the equipment needed to film and view them, finding them all in perfect working order became an adventure that Indiana Jones would be proud of. Lieber attempted to produce the next episode retro tech At Polavision, I went on a three-month odyssey that I won’t spoil for you, but it’s too much to fit into a regular web video.
“I didn’t expect this [to become such a journey]” he says. “This really became almost a feature-length documentary because it was one of those rabbit hole situations where I just kept digging deeper, deeper, deeper…It’s an incredible journey down… It was a long journey.”
The biggest problem was that the film didn’t have a long shelf life. “The tape itself contained reagents similar to those used in instant cameras, chemical reagents for developing film,” Lieber explains. “And now that 40 years have passed, it’s all dried up. The chemicals are essentially just dust.”
Undeterred, Lieber tracked down a technology collector nicknamed “Doc” who lived in Austria. He had several Polavision film cartridges in cold storage, and even a camera and projector system. The question here was, “Are any of them still working?” Watch our video to find out. However, suffice it to say, this is not a simple yes or no answer. It was more like a Russian nesting doll. One man’s crusade to dominate the home video market in 1977 leads to another man’s crusade to save a failing company, and yet another man’s mission to shoot a Polavision video in 2024. Ta. Successes, even failures, are almost secondary to the idea that innovation and forward thinking should always be championed. And we don’t know whether that bold idea will become a technological footnote or a bulwark of a new future.
Or maybe it’s just a good story.
