The End of the Start of "Instant"
Polaroid announced that it will stop making film for its iconic cameras at the end of the year: the ones that took and showed you a picture “instantly.”
I’m frankly amazed they are still making film. I didn’t know that they’d stopped making the cameras only a year ago; and, did you know their first “instant” camera came out in 1948?
The last fact is the one that really strikes me. We live in an instant world. Polaroid cameras and film were one of the precursors of what we now take for granted, coming just before the fifties when words like "fast," "quick," "jiffy," and others like them took over advertising and consumer products.
Interestingly, one of the antecedents of the computer, and now digital, age, the semiconductor/transistor, was invented at about the same time at Bell Laboratories.
"Instant cameras" are now digital cameras, enabled by a "chip," the ancestor of the transistor. Two contemporaneous inventions wend their ways for a bit more than fifty years and one is replaced by the other in a way that could never have been thought of at the start. Sounds like a segment in the old Connections TV series.
4 comments:
I've noticed that polaroid pictures don't seem to age well. At least, not the ones I took during childhood. I am surprised they just stopped making the cameras though. Haven't seen one in ages...
I'm actually surprised they've lasted this long. They were always substandard photographic quality. And the polaroids I've seen have seemed to fade over the years.
They were cool to see, but standards have changed.
My word! Polaroid cameras...now there's something i haven't thought about in ages.
I always feel bad for companies when new technology puts them out of business.
We still have one of the Polaroid cameras! It's been sitting in a closet for years. Didn't know they still made the film. And yes the pictures do fade.
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