Word: instants
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...most startling-and certainly the costliest-of the new generation of cameras is a box of magic from Polaroid, the developer of instant photography. Like all previous Polaroid Land cameras, the compact new camera will almost certainly bear the name of its inventor, Edwin Herbert Land, the founder, president, chairman and research director of Polaroid. Dark-eyed and quite youthful for his 63 years, Land looks every inch the scientific genius. A paradoxical person, he alternates between lives as laboratory recluse and businessman-philosopher. He can be intensely shy and awkwardly unsure in face-to-face conversation...
...claims jokingly that by the time he and Jennifer returned from their walk, he had solved all the problems "except for the ones that it has taken from 1943 to 1972 to solve." Actually, he managed to work out enough of the bugs to announce the invention of "instant photography" to an amazed group of optical scientists early in 1947 and to put the first Polaroid Land camera on sale late in 1948. The "Model 95" weighed nearly 4 lbs., produced sepia-toned pictures of varying quality and retailed...
...success, Land was convinced as early as 1963 that if Polaroid owners could get a small, easily portable, nonmessy instant-picture camera, they would buy huge numbers of them -and far more of Polaroid's high-profit film than they now do. Thus, Land undertook the greatest camera quest of his career: development of the SX-70. "The program to create our new camera was like a siren," he says. "She never came clean to say whether she meant to succeed or not, but she never let us escape...
Even so, Kodak is painfully embarrassed at finding itself so far behind in instant photography. Convinced for years that Polaroid could never find a camera inexpensive enough to tap the mass market, Kodak's chiefs were finally toppled from their complacency by the success of the Polaroid Swinger in the mid-'60s, and they ordered a hurry-up research project into an alternate system of instant photography. Land was no longer simply an ingenious inventor and customer; he was an enlarging and possibly troublesome competitor. Kodak executives were surprised by the high quality of the color prints produced...
Kodak reports that it is pouring "very substantial funds" into instant photography. Land says that Kodak researchers still "don't know where they're going" with an instant process. Some stock analysts, however, believe that the company plans to market its own instant film process for use in Polaroid cameras as early as 1973. These experts are convinced that any camera buff-even a Polaroid owner-would automatically have faith in a new yellow-box product. Meanwhile, there is much speculation that Kodak and Polaroid are racing each other to introduce -some time in the next few years...