Word: polaroiding
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
Fortunately for both inventor and company, Polaroid managed to market its idea in other forms. Polaroid nonglare sunglasses, introduced in 1937, fared well with consumers, and the company still sells 25 million pairs of lenses annually. Polaroid grew quickly during World War II, producing goggles, glasses and filters, but it sagged after the war ended. In 1947 the company lost $2,000,000; it sorely needed to develop new products. Naturally, Land was ready with an idea...
...basic developing process in the Model 95 has been greatly refined but remains the same even in Polaroid's new small camera. A negative is exposed, then brought into contact with a positive print sheet, and both are drawn between a pair of rollers. In the process, a small pod of jelly-like chemicals attached to the positive is ruptured and spread across the sheet. Within seconds, the finished picture is ready. The other new feature of the Model 95 was Land's "exposure value system," which reduced the previously complex calculation of shutter speed and lens opening...
Nobody has watched Polaroid's growth with keener interest than the chiefs of Kodak, the Rochester giant built on George Eastman's first "little black box" in 1888. Kodak has undoubtedly lost ground to Polaroid but is still a mammoth company which had sales last year of $3 billion from photo products, synthetic fibers (Kodel) and chemicals...
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...