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Polaroid Can't Compete with Digital Cameras
mobydobius was among several who noted that poloroid can't keep up in the era of digital cameras. They filed for chapter 11, and have a billion dollars of debt. This deal gets them a bit of cash, but none of this seems surprising considering the cost of their instant film. In just a few short years, digital cameras knocked 'em down. There's a lesson here, but I think it's something like "Don't eat the Yellow Snow".
They do, expensive ones. Polaroid has been on the ropes for a while now. Articles examining this have pinned it on a failure to innovate.
No major changes in their models, and no improvements in prices.
Main moral to gain from this is don't sit back and relax just because you (were) on top...
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
Actually, if you read yesterday's nytimes article, the company had been headed down at least since 1988, (before digital cameras) when they were first in debt. Their demise is attributed not just to a failure to keep up with digital, but to a string of bad business decisions.
Besides, even before digital cameras they had to compete against disposables and the general drop in camera prices and features.
Summary: "Polaroid invented the dot-com model before anyone else!"
:)
Speaking as an owner of a Digital Polaroid (PDC1100), one issue was that their digital camera just wasn't that well made.
Looking at their instant cameras (which I also own one of), these weren't particularly ergonomic and certainly not cost effective. It was simply that they were the only instant cameras (due to patents).
And CostCo warehouse was having weird Polaroid-sponsored rebates-- buy a 4-pack of film and get a camera for free! After you have 4 cameras just by buying refills, you start to think maybe Polaroid's profit model was a little wacked.
Let's see... lossy marketing schemes, shoddy goods, reliance on a patent instead of a good product, entrance into new markets with substandard goods... yep, they were a dot-com without the dot or com part
A.
Had a party last night.
Took polaroids and had a digital:
The digital was untouched and the polaroid took 405 pics before we ran out of film.
Polaroids are instant (no shutter lag), give you a hard, permanent picture within seconds.
Polaroid's current problems are due to a load of debt assumed in 1988 due to a hostile takeover bid.
However, assuming money is not an object, give people at a party a choice between taking polaroids and using a digital and the polaroid will win out.
I just wish that polaroid film was cheaper. It is a superior technology to digital in many ways. Sure it is an "analog" technology versus a digital one, but the world is analog not digital.
BTW, didn't get any good chick pix that I can publish, so don't rub it in.
evanchik.net
Correct.
My grandmother purchased two Polaroid cameras for my kids (11 & 12) last Christmas. They took instant "sticker" photos, the size of a postage stamp.
Cute, for about 5 minutes. The pictures were way too small, and the replacement film cost and arm and a leg.
The cameras lasted about a week. Real crap.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I would have gotten the digital pic printed out at kinkos where they have high quality printers, consumer models just can't get the colors right.
Photos.
Polaroid sued Kodak out of the instant photo market even though Kodak had a vastly superior product.
-Eric
Forget about Polaroid CAMERAS. They're consumer products, and crappy ones, too. But you can use Pola-Backs with almost any medium or large format camera (and there are even adaptors for 35mm cameras).
So you set everything up (including your Hasselblad or whatever camera you use), and put on the Pola-Back and take a test-shot. Now you can check the lighting, light-temperature (within certain limits), composition, etc. That is much easier than while looking through the viewfinder, and you're less likely to miss something. You can also put shots from several different setups side by side and compare them. And the photographer can retain a crude idea of the image if he gives the negatives or slides away.
But there are also Polaroid black/white films where you get a negative in addition to the positive (the print). You can use that to make an enlargement - I have already seen a very expensive, very well done calendar done entirely using Polaroid films.
So there are a lot of things you can do with Polaroids (much more than just what I mentioned here) - just forget about cheap plastic cameras and i-Zone crap!
And that is the market where digital cameras are no real competition. Yes, there are digital backs etc. But there are things you just can't do with digital cameras. And with the speed of current scan-backs, I wouldn't be surprised if photographers still used a Polaroid before making that final scan (a scan-back scans the are where the image is normally projected onto the film).
EagerEyes.org: Visualization and Visual Communication
Main use i have seen for them is artsy pictures
like here.
polaroid doen not only come in the small sizes most consumers know them, they have some verry big film as well (think poster size)
42
Don't forget, they have had a lot of name recognition for "instant photos" on the world market. They could have had a big jump on the rest when it came to marketing digital camera technology.
That's why I bought a Polaroid digital camera a few years ago when I was looking that (at the time) cost me $350.00. I figured that if anyone was going to take care to make a nice digital camera it would be Polaroid, considering the importance of their name and their stake in instant photography. I had been a long time Polaroid film camera user, and felt like I'd be willing to pay a little more (once again) for someone who did instant (this time digital) photography properly.
The camera was a total piece of 1-megapixel-shit. It took horrible, grainy, blurry pictures whose colors bled into each other. The chromatic aberration was something to behold, the hue reproduction was nasty (everything was brown!), the flash was weak, and it would eat a set of lithium AA batteries in only about 10 minutes of use. The worst part of it was that the construction was horribly cheap -- battery and connector doors were like parts of a McDonald's happy meal toy -- made of thin, brittle plastic and held in place by friction alone.
Figuring that maybe I had just been unlucky and got ahold of a lemon or a preproduction model or a customer return or something, I took it back and exchanged it for another. Same deal. I was about to give up on digital photography. It still hadn't occurred to me that Polaroid was at fault for putting out a truly lousy product.
Then I had a chance to work with a friend's Olympus digital camera in the same price range. It took great pictures that really completely outdid 35mm consumer-level products. Compared to the Polaroid camera I had bought, it had a similar 1-megapixel resolution, had more features, had removable/expandable memory (via SmartMedia), was built very solidly, and was about the same price as the Polaroid with batteries lasting about four times longer.
I bought the Olympus camera and was thrilled at the first download of photos, which were TRULY great (esp. the macro shots) and was able to compare and see just how awful the Polaroid's photos were.
Since then, a number of friends who were considering Polaroid digital cameras have looked at my early shots and decided to buy Olympus instead. And last year, when I wanted to upgrade to a higher resolution camera to get 8x10 photos out of it, I ended up going with a Nikon Coolpix without even considering Polaroid after using their film cameras for years.
With their initial foray into digital, they lost me and many of my friends as customers. Too bad they didn't take the technology more seriously.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
It is easy to see why digital photography has given Polariod's instant camera technology a challenge in the marketplace. Both live on removing the need for an outside processing lab. Digital photography gives the additional features of being able to send and manipulate the photographs. I see some areas where the polaroid technology still has some advantages- Cheaper upfront equipment cost, disposable equipment and comes with a built in printer. I have both a couple of polaroids and a digital camera. The polaroid is kept for emergencies. My digital camera has replaced my 35MM camera.
I hope that polaroid stays afloat enough to keep its basic product line alive, but they definitely need to make changes to respond to the changing marketplace. I'm thinking of emergency cameras or survival cameras. If they can make a completely disposable instant camera along the lines of the disposable 35MM, they might have a sustainable niche.
-tpg
1. Photo printers are crap, most only print at 300dpi -- no way that will look like a real photo! What you want is a nice inkjet (2880 dpi Epson or HP) and some high-quality paper (glossy photo paper or glossy plastic film). My 8x10's printed this way impress the HELL out of my shutterbug friends and look MUCH better than any 8x10's you can get done commercially -- only those friends who self-develop manage better prints.
2. Your DV camcorder does not take 4 megapixel shots. My digital camera does, meaning I can get lots of detail into an 8x10 photo, while you would get nice blurs at that size, especially with wide-angle or distance shots.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
That may be true, but it's also somewhat beside the point. Polaroid may keep some business by continuing to serve professional photographers (though I expect that professional model digital cameras are going to start eating that market, too) but the demise of the consumer market is still a terrible blow. The professional market you describe is obviously only a tiny fraction of the total market. Losing the biggest portion of your market is a terrible blow, and one that the company is going to have a hard time dealing with. Whether or not they continue to exist in some form, you can pretty well guarantee that it won't be anything like the company today. That's going to hurt whether it means completely closing shop or just shrinking by an order of magnitude.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Polaroid is a cheap way to take pictures in the short term. The camera's never get outdated (I'm using a 1968 Land camera witht he peel apart 669 film). Yeah, a $1 a shot is a lot, but compared to the bleeding edge Casio QV-10 that I paid $450 in 96 (320x240), I think the initial $20 laydown for a Polaroid camera is well worth it.
I think form factor is really the biggest limitation of the format. Quality is acceptable, and with the right film, you can do some really artistic things to the print. (Emulsion/Negative transfers for 669, swirly-Van-Gogh effects with SX-70).
Getting an Autographed Polaroid, and knowing that there is only one, and that it's unique has value to me as well (unless they used a slide enlarger to run off a few hundred)
Often in Error, Never in Doubt.
I am not surprised...
I recall when they were suing Kodak over instant film camera patents and after a protracted court case won.
It seems spending money and energy on court battles instead of putting the same resources into R&D is the kiss of death.
Remember Lotus 123 Look & Feel battle?
Remember DBase court battles?
Remember Aple v Microsoft GUI battle?
The Kiss of Death for those companies!
Oh, if you think Apple isn't the victim of the Kiss of Death, just look who is their biggest stock-owner.
there is a world of difference between new technology making old technology obsolete through superiority and new technology making traditional methods of protecting intellectual property harder to enforce.
Digital cameras, and other techological advancements of its kind, provide a superior and more economical service to all necessary parties. In other words, they are both superior and exist organically, that is to say, without leaching off the outside world.
"Advancements" such as filesharing certainly disrupt, but they do not necessarily provide a complete solution for all involved--even for its own continued existence (e.g., once novel IP dies, the need for those kinds of services dies). This much simply is not arguable. What is arguable, is whether or not such a solution is even POSSIBLE. I lean strongly towards the IMPOSSIBLE side, but nonetheless I think even the IP owners' critics should be aware of the difference.
So there are a lot of things you can do with Polaroids
/ dc board.cgi?az=show_thread&om=1513&forum=DCForumID24 &archive=yes
If you feel compelled to adjust your projector without instrumentation, you can easily tell if it close to correct by taking a Polaroid color photograph (without flash) of the 11 step crossed gray scale on Video Essentials or AVIA. Although Polaroid color film is balanced for 5600 degrees Kelvin, the difference between the film primaries and the proper CIE tristimulus filter response causes a display which has been properly adjusted to D65 (6500 degrees Kelvin) to photograph well. Polaroid color film has is very sensitive to color temperature errors and cannot be fooled. The eye is easily fooled, and most people judge display color temperature between 9000 and 13000 degrees to be perfect.
Any color tint that you observe in the black and white gray scale pattern is the error in your white balance. If the photograph is blue, you have too much blue. Either decrease blue, or increase red and green. If the photograph is magenta, decrease red and blue or increase green. If the photograph is yellow, increase blue or decrease red and green.
http://www.thebigpicturedvd.com/cgi-bin/dcforum
In a perfect world, intelligent life doesn't evolve.
If you open your mind too wide, people will throw trash in it.
With real estate prices as they are in Cambridge, I bet Polaroid could cut a chunk of debt just by renting or selling off their land. They have properties in some very desirable locations.
Commercial space in Cambridgeport rents at around $60/sq foot, when it can be found. Even with the current "recession" prices haven't budged. Hop on over the the WSJ for some insight.
With their name, their engineering talent, their land (to provide some cash) and a reasonable restructuring, Polaroid could relaunch themselves as a player in the digital market in under two years.
Polaroid has, for many years, made a variety of products besides instant film and instant cameras, such as various lenses, glasses (as in eyewear), DIGITAL CAMERAS, and SCANNERS. Their scanners are well rated, and their digital cameras may have been nothing special but were stunningly cheap and performed well for the price. My aunt bought one for $50, and it was quite a nice thing for simple snapshots, which is all most people want out of a digital camera anyway. (Perhaps not us slashdotters, but we're not most people.)
Moreover, the instant film market isn't gone, it's just oblivious. Every january I go to a science fiction convention and bring several recent-model polaroid instant cameras, and walk around with at least one in my hands so I can stop people with costumes in the hall and tell them "smile!" I take two pictures of each person, and you should see how excited they get when they see I'm giving them a polaroid. The usual reaction is "Wow, I thought Polaroid went out of business years ago! You can still buy the cameras and film? Where do I get it? Can I buy it right here at the hotel? I want one right away!" I tell them what it costs and they tell me that's fine. I tell them they can buy it at Sears and they're amazed.
What that tells me is, Polaroid's market exists, and their products are fine, they just have lousy advertising.
I wish Polaroid well. I wish them a good ad agency. I've used their cameras all my life and loved them. My father and grandfather before me used polaroids for seemingly forever too. We've always had superb experiences with the products. I wouldn't want to see them die.
The BEST thing that will be missed is making polarioid transfers with the old style multi-part film that is used for the hasselblad backs. I hope to god that if they stop making the film that someone else will make the same self-developing film packages, so I can take a picture, open the film prematurely and slap it down on a piece of wood or paper and get that fantastic edgy eroded look with pastel greens and browns.
For examples, go here: http://www.soulshapes.com/ and click on images on the left navbar. (framed page)
For info and howto stuff about polaroid transfers, try http://www.frii.com/~uliasz/photoart/polaroid/
:)
Mike
Instant photographs were an absolutely great thing to base a business on. It's certainly as good as sweet fizzy water or a million other things. Before Polaroid you took a photo and either developed it yourself or waited a few days for someone else to do so. After them you had it THERE, right NOW (well, a minute or so.) That's a profound thing - it was revolutionary then and still fundamental now.
This is fantastic in a consumer market. Put one on a table and the fun begins. Take the first picture, see how it came out, try a next, then a third, now it's the photographers turn to get snapped. Did Sue's tan come out - no - try again.
Industrially/governmentally they are also invaluable. For a generation any photo ID made that you could walk away with was a Polaroid. Driver's licenses, school IDs, badges, passes, whatever. Anyone who had to document things also loved these as they immediately saw what they had photographed, were sure if they'd captured what they wanted or not, could drop it in the folder and the matter was closed.
Professional photographers also find Polaroids invaluable. The look is distinctive yet mesmerizing. Rich colors that blended almost like pastels. Aside from their visual quality they were also the perfect tool for proofing a shot, seeing how it would come out before the "real" one was taken. Ask any studio photographer and they'll show you their stock of Polaroid film.
Can quick-develop machines do this? Well only if you want to go to the drop-off, come back in an hour, try and figure out what each shot was, hope they got what you wanted, etc. Quick is NOT the same as instant.
What about digital? If you want to lug along a camera with finicky light requirements and so-so resolution then go print it the pic. It only takes a set of electronics that costs from a few hundred to a few thousands of dollars and is often far less compelling in court then an less tamperable analog photograph.
No, Polaroid had a good business model. Unfortunately they didn't expand from that model (well, not in any significant way) so when it began to contract they were hurt. They also have/had a really dysfunctional culture and an inability to effect fundamental changes internally. Disposable cameras hurt them, digital cameras hurt them, debt-service hurt them, massive overhead hurt them, their pension plan and employee benefits hurt them, their pricey office spaces hurt them, the credit crunch hurt them, but they were broken inside long before these pushed them over the edge.
Frankly they should've outsourced the film & camera production side of things, cut instant-film R&D to maintenance mode, done some customer research and come up with things like the i-Zone ten years ago, streamlined their operations, accelerated their product development time from it's apparent many-year cycle to something reasonable, gotten over their not-invented-here phobia & partnered with a good maker of consumer digital cameras offering their brandname/distribution/cash in return for a private label series, slashed their staffing at all levels 50%, cleaned up their baroque & cumbersome internal policies, legendary bureaucracy and self-destructive infighting.
No, much of the blame for Polaroid goes to the Board for never having put in place a strong President and giving her/him the backing to really go and fix things. It would have meant tearing out the broken parts of the company and slicing off much of the fat but it needed to be done and instead the whole place just ground along until it suffocated.
I've worked with a large number of recent refugees from Polaroid over the years and they all tell the same stories of intrigue, incompetence, infighting, dysfunction and lack of direction.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Actually, some of Polaroid's cameras did have good lenses, zoom and otherwise; they made professional-level cameras up until the early '90s. They still make ones for niche markets--but niches where photo quality isn't that important.
If you're a photography buff, you'll recognize that importance of what those Polaroid cameras really were: they weren't just "instant" cameras, they were medium format cameras. When I say they had a professional line, they were low-end professional, to be sure--but they were endorsed by no less a professional than Ansel Adams. (And by "endorsed" I don't mean he was paid to be a spokesman--as far as I know he never was. He wrote about them with some enthusiasm in his classic photography textbooks.)
Really, that might be the place where they most significantly missed the boat. They couldn't compete with digital cameras for the instant part, but they could easily have continued their "prosumer" line and even enhanced it--instead of fruitlessly trying to undercut digital cameras, they should have been marketing themselves as a way to get into medium-format photography with prices competitive with 35mm SLR cameras. If I ran the zoo, er, camera company, I'd have probably even done something radical like make that prosumer line be able to accept both instant film cartridges and cheaper ones that required external development. If you could do that, then given the way the Land Cameras were designed--pretty simply, with the ability to have changable backs in some models--the next step would have been to work on a "digital cartridge" that converted the camera into a digital medium format camera. (Right now digital medium format cameras are... let's just say they're not as cheap as digital SLRs. If you know how much most digital SLRs cost, that should worry you.)
It's kind of surprising to me, in retrospect, that a company as innovative as Polaroid had been instead decided the best course through the '90s would be to refocus themselves as the Kiddie Camera Company. One does honestly wonder what the hell they were thinking.
Last time I had some passport photos taken it was done on a Polaroid camera. Couple of minutes later I had four glossy pictures of my shining face - all alike.
Question: What will replace that?
Sure on our drivers license they take a photo with a digital camera thingy and send it off for printing and laminating onto plastic, but what about tertiary institutes which want you to post them a photo of yourself? Or when you post off to apply for your passport? And the fine print specifically states that it must not be printed out from a computer (ie, digital camera + Epson Stylus)