Result? After the novelty wore off (and it did so quickly) I went back to using my phone to take pictures.
If I were them I'd recognize this and either adapt my marketing to focus on niche retailers, tourist destinations and the holiday seasons.
Result? After the novelty wore off (and it did so quickly) I went back to using my phone to take pictures.
If I were them I'd recognize this and either adapt my marketing to focus on niche retailers, tourist destinations and the holiday seasons.
The killer app was always scientific documentation with the intent of making sure there was a photograph that captured what would be important later. Putting a Polaroid back on a technical camera was another way of using technical cameras to do what they were made to do.
Specialty film for ID cameras was a big, big deal for Polaroid as well. DMV, passports, company badges.
Digital ID photos were the first major digital blow against Polaroid. ID photos don't have to be all that great, as a rule (meaning that early, low-res digital cameras were good enough) and the entities that used ID cameras were perfectly willing to invest a lot of money in a digital camera, if it meant they weren't burning through expensive Polaroid film (even back then, shooting Polaroid film was like lighting $10 or $20 bills on fire).
Scientific and legal uses (which do require high-quality imaging) got eaten by digital as well, of course, but ID photos were what first put Polaroid on the rocks.
Law enforcement and investigations, too. For a while Polaroids were the detective's camera of choice. But they died out quickly, just like consumer usages.
Weren't they big on film sets to check lighting, too?
Polaroids also tended to have high to extremely high ISO/ASA numbers (compared to the final film, which in my day tended to be 4x5 or 8x10 transparencies at ISO 50 to 100 that cost somewhere between 10 and 50 dollars an exposure when all was said and done). You could make that up (to a degree) with your shutter shooting under hot lights, but with flash, not so much. And studio flash in those days usually only had a two or three stop adjustment range, so ND gels it was, and hope that they were accurate. All in all, a real pain in the sitting-down bits, and if it weren't for the fact that getting it wrong on the transparency meant a hundred bucks or so (two frames minimum per shot, since dust bunnies can easily make their way into cleaned, de-staticked and practically hermetically sealed film holders no matter what the laws of physics have to say about it) and half a day shot to hell by the time you got it back and dried down it wouldn't have been worth it then either.
Did I mention that digital is better in every imaginable way?
I'm hoping this is a high-end camera. They already have the low-end market covered by the decades of old Polaroids lying around. I have an excellent 600 Business Edition ($30 ebay) and don't really feel the need to upgrade.