I drove 8,000 miles for the camera that killed Polaroid

It’s the kind of story that could become the foundation of the company’s identity and, if they’re lucky, the plot of its possible fictional biopic: A brand that dominates one type of technology takes a bold, risky step into the great unknown so it can lead its industry into the future.

It’s a great story… when it’s successful.

When it’s not, boldly grabbing the brass ring of a new technology can hurt a company for years. This is why you must have forgotten about the Polaroid Polavision camera. And why your likely point of reference for Polaroid is their recent licensing deals that have relegated their instant cameras to an ironic, kitschy zombie existence that only seems to add salt to the wound of its attempt to reinvent home cinema in the late 70s.

The Polavision was touted as Polaroid’s biggest and most important innovation since it had been in development for more than a decade. Just as the company pioneered the instant camera, it was about to head into the ’80s as the leader in instant video. That was the plan anyway. Polavision was a unique film production system that consisted of a handheld device cella film cartridge and a proprietary viewer that would simultaneously process the film (using a new type of color addition process that allows instant exposure) and then display what was captured. Polaroid co-founder Edwin Land saw Polavision as something of a personal crusade. Despite some internal resistance (primarily from Polaroid president Bill McCune), Land introduced the camera at Polaroid’s annual shareholder meeting in 1977, and it hit store shelves that same year, backed by advertising featuring many did not play tennis well and aging Such Hollywood legends as Danny Kaye.

However, the problems were obvious from the start. Each film cartridge could only shoot about two and a half minutes of footage. He also couldn’t pick up any sound. Because of the slow film speed, each “film” required an enormous amount of light to process the image successfully. Outdoors during the day it performed mostly well – colors were grainy and muted, there was a lot of “noise” in the image, but you could generally understand what was going on. Indoor shots, however, were often extremely dirty, and you could almost forget about shooting at night without lighting.

Despite its novelty, the Polavision failed to capture the imagination of consumers the way the Polaroid camera had, and initial sales were poor. To make matters worse, JVC and Sony were already on their way to introducing primitive versions of the camcorder in the early 1980s that, even in their initial forms, surpassed the Polavision in terms of image quality, recording time, and sound-capturing capabilities.

“Polaroid was a company that absolutely dominated the 20s^thousand century,” says Kevin Lieber, host Popular science Retro equipment video series. “They dominated instant photography and they thought home video was going to be the next big thing, and that’s what the Polavision camera was – a very ambitious attempt to break into video. And it failed. Very bad. She had been dead for two years and is seen as the tipping point for the company’s eventual collapse.’

Still, for enthusiasts like Lieber, 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 film itself, but also the equipment required to shoot and watch it, finding all the pieces in full working order was an adventure that would have made Indiana Jones proud. Lieber decided to make an episode Retro equipment on Polavision, and without spoilers found myself on a three-month odyssey that cannot fit into a typical web video.

“I didn’t expect it to be such a journey,” he says. “It actually turned into almost a full-length documentary because it was one of those rabbit hole situations where I just kept digging deeper and deeper and deeper … it was an incredible trail to follow.”

The biggest problem was that film does not have a long shelf life. “The tapes themselves used a reagent similar to what instant cameras used—a chemical reagent to develop the film,” Lieber explains. “And it all dried up because it’s been 40 years. Basically, chemicals are just dust.”

Undeterred, Lieber tracked down a tech collector named “Doc” who lived in Austria and had several Polavision film cartridges in cold storage, along with a camera and even a projector system. Now the question was, “Do any of them work?” You can watch our video to find out, but suffice it to say, it’s far from 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 led to another man’s crusade to save a failing company, which in turn led to yet another man’s task shoot a Polavision video in 2024. was not successful is almost secondary to the idea that even in the face of failure, innovation and forward thinking should always be encouraged. And you never know if that bold idea will become a technological footnote or a bastion of a new future.

Or maybe just a good story.