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

It’s a story that could form the basis of a company’s identity and, if they’re lucky, become the plot of their upcoming feature biopic: a brand dominant in 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…if it’s successful.

And if not, then a bold attempt to seize the ring of new technologies could undermine the company for many years. This is why you probably forgot about the Polaroid Polavision camera. And why your likely benchmark for Polaroid is their recent licensing deals, which have returned their instant cameras to an ironic, kitschy zombie existence that only seems to rub salt into the wound of their attempt to redefine home cinema in the late ’70s.

Polavision was touted as Polaroid’s biggest and most important innovation, having been in development for over a decade. Just as the company pioneered the instant camera, it would become a leader in instant video in the 1980s. At least that was the plan. Polavision was a unique film production system consisting of a portable cameraa film cartridge and a patented viewer that simultaneously processed the film (using a new type of color-adding process that allowed instant development) and then displayed the footage. Polaroid co-founder Edwin Land saw Polavision as something of a personal crusade. Despite some internal resistance (most notably from Polaroid president Bill McCune), Land introduced the camera at Polaroid’s annual shareholders meeting in 1977, and it hit store shelves that same year, backed by advertising that included a lot of played tennis poorly and aging Hollywood legends like Danny Kaye.

However, problems were obvious from the very beginning. Each film cartridge could shoot for approximately two and a half minutes. He also couldn’t hear a sound. Because of film’s low speed, each “film” required enormous amounts of light to successfully process the image. During the day outside, it mostly worked fine—colors were grainy and muted, and there was a lot of “noise” in the image, but you could generally make out what was going on. However, interior shots were often very muddy and one could almost forget about filming anything at night without klieg lighting.

Despite its novelty, Polavision failed to capture the imagination of consumers the way the Polaroid instant camera did, and initial sales were low. To make matters worse, JVC and Sony were already about to introduce primitive versions of the camcorder in the early 1980s that, even in their nascent forms, were superior to the Polavision in terms of image quality, recording length, and ability to capture sound.

“Polaroid was the company that dominated the 20s.^th century,” says Kevin Lieber, host of the program Popular Science Retro Tech video series. “They dominated instant photography and thought the next big thing would be home video, and that’s what the Polavision camera was – a very ambitious attempt to get into video. And it failed. Very bad. The company died two years later, and this is considered the turning point for the company’s eventual collapse.”

Still, for enthusiasts like Lieber, a working Polavision camera is something of a holy grail, as it is for Edwin Land. However, due to the complexity of not only the film itself, but also the devices needed to film and view it, finding all the pieces in fully working order was an adventure that would make Indiana Jones proud. Lieber intended to film the episode Retro Tech on Polavision and—no spoilers—ended up in a three-month Odyssey that would be impossible to fit into a regular web video.

“I didn’t expect it to be such a journey,” he says. “It actually turned into almost a feature-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 the film did not have a long shelf life. “The cassettes themselves used a reagent similar to what was used in instant cameras—a chemical reagent for developing film,” Lieber explains. “And it all dried up because 40 years passed. Basically, the chemicals are just dust.”

Undeterred, Lieber tracked down a tech collector nicknamed “Doc,” who lived in Austria and had several cassettes of Polavision film in his refrigerator, as well as a camera and even a projector. Now the question is, “Are any of them still working?” You can watch our video to find out, but suffice to say, this is 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 mission to make Polavision video in 2024 year. there was no success, almost secondary to the idea that even in the face of failure, innovation and vision should always be maintained. And you never know whether this bold idea will become a technological footnote or the bulwark of a new future.

Or maybe just a good story.