Word: film
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When the Polaroid film factory in the Dutch town of Enschede shut down in June 2008, it seemed to signal the end for one of the most ingenious and iconic innovations of the 20th century. Almost 60 years after American inventor Edwin H. Land sold the first Model 95 of his new instant-picture camera in Boston in November 1948, the troubled Polaroid Corp. halted its cassette-film production for good. Demand was still relatively high - the plant churned out 30 million cassettes in 2007 and 24 million in the first half of 2008 - but the plant...
...quickly agreed that there was a great market opportunity for a new instant film," remembers Kaps, who switched tracks after getting a biology Ph.D. to enter the retro-photography business. First he worked as an executive with the Lomographical Society, founded in Vienna in 1992 to celebrate the Russian Lomo camera, a very basic snapper that conquered some bohemian corners of the West after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Then, four years ago, Kaps fell in love with Polaroid and founded a company specializing in selling equipment for analog instant photography. An official partner of Polaroid, the company still...
...October 2008, Kaps, 39, and Bosman, 55, took $2.6 million in private capital and started what they endearingly called the Impossible Project, with a view to reinventing the traditional Polaroid film. They founded a company named Impossible, leased a small building on the site of the closed Enschede plant, secured some key production machinery and hired nine former Polaroid employees to come up with new formulas for both a monochrome and a color version of the instant film. The new films would have unique characteristics but still maintain some of the best bits of Polaroid, like the square shape...
...Impossible's instant pictures have a look that's reminiscent of the early days of photography, "but this will be part of their charm," says Kaps. While the company is still in negotiations with Polaroid over the use of the Polaroid name, it has been given permission to make film that will work in Polaroid cameras. The trial monochrome version of the film will go into production at the end of October and, if all goes according to plan, should be available to the masses in time for Christmas, "before people start to throw away their old Polaroid cameras," says...
...Failure in the nascent field won't break the company. Fujifilm has other businesses such as medical imaging and motion-picture film, and only gets about 5% of its total revenue from its digital camera business. But company officials figure the bet could pay off handsomely if 3-D catches on and Fujifilm, which holds numerous patents on the technology, has a head start. Just standing still isn't a very appealing strategy. The digital-camera market is stagnating. About 128 million digicams were sold last year, and amid the recession, sales are expected to shrink this year, according...