Polaroid for the last time

Sep 1, 2008 at 12:08 AM
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Polaroid 2008: interesting Helvetica signage: main streetside "Polaroid" sign, plus "STOP. fasten se

Polaroid was once a great company, famous for their "instant" cameras, which were great in the film era when the normal procedure was to shoot film negatives, then get them developed and have prints given back to you a week later, or later on, an hour later.

Polaroid 2008: giant tubes at hilltop building

Of course, all of this will be ancient history to anyone who grew up in the digital camera era, which was exactly the problem for Polaroid. They had a thriving business going supporting a market that was about to get turned inside out, and even though they saw it coming, they still didn't make the switch fast enough to stay alive.

Polaroid 2008: giant pipes going into the roof of one hilltop building

Now, it's pretty much all over for Polaroid. Their pretty art deco headquarters along the Charles River on Memorial Drive in Cambridge got sold off when they went bankrupt in 2001. The assets were spun off, including the name, leaving a shell company to scrap the carcass. Then it was announced in February 2008 that they would leave the instant film business by 2009, and shut down the remaining factories, including this one next to Rt 128/I-95 in Waltham, MA.

Sic transit gloria.

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The Polaroid instant film technology was pretty neat at the time, but did have some drawbacks. (It was nice to see that the picture you took at the top of Mt Koolau came out well before you took the trek down, but on the other hand, you had to carry all of these photographs around with you for the rest of the vacation.) Of course, now with digital cameras, you have both the preview capabilities of an instant camera with the longevity and reduplication abilities greater than film could have.

Whether they saw the change in the market coming or not (the Apple QuickTake was released a few years before that, Logitech Fotoman a few before that, etc.) seeing the market moving in a new direction doesn't necessarily mean they have the talent or resources available to take advantage of it. (the chemical engineers and mechanical engineers in their R&D department will be little help making a digital camera.)

When I worked at a startup in the early to mid 90's, there was a guy who worked nights as a content producer and during the day at Polaroid in Waltham. Besides the consumer market with the products that I new about, it was interesting to hear how much went into the commercial and government markets (photo IDs, employee badges, etc.) Those probably lasted a while because it would take a long time for a state government or a multinational corporation to change enough of their infrastructure for digital photography. (but knowing the change is going to happen slower gives a company little comfort with the certainty that it will disappear.) I was more surprised at how big their optics and lens departments were for supplying third parties like medical equipment manufacturers. (If you have the facilities to produce high resolution optics, its probably a rare talent.)

Its sort of interesting to compare Polaroid and Apple on the decision to not license their core technologies. Kodak probably put Polaroid in a no win situation there. If Polaroid settled and licensed their technologies to Kodak, Kodak might have taken over the instant photography market. With Polaroid holding out for a judgement, Kodak managed to distract Polaroid for a decade.

With Polaroid's demise in mind I recently mounted an exhibit called "Instant Waltham" at Back Pages Books on Moody Street. In a nod to irony I used Fuji instant film in my Polaroid 420. Check it out, it's still up. Some are at http://www.tanophoto.com.

Polaroid for the last time

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