Fuji Instax in all its forms won this battle and there’s a cottage industry of Instax-holding backs being 3D-printed to retro-fit older cameras like the 600SE or anything with a Graflok connection.

That said, if the outcome of modern Polaroids is exactly what you’re after and an SX70 is not your cup of tea, here’s your new toy.

No thanks.

just about the only thing this could possibly beat an SX70 on is the autofocus if it's good, maybe shutter speed but they seem cagey about it, and maybe durability.

the foldable sx70 is just too nice. who wants to carry around a brick?

if you are a camera hacker check out the OpenSX70 project.

edit: specs on the shop page https://www.polaroid.com/en_us/products/i2-polaroid-camera

98mm/f8 to f64 (28mm equiv), shutter 1/250 (seriously?), and AF is infrared so you'll hate it. fuckin analog yo

This style of photography is just the complete opposite of what we'll all grown to expect from cameras. We expect them to have microscopic resolution so we can view the photos on 5 inch wide screens. We expect to click one button, and then spend hours tweaking the photo in arbitrary ways until we get an effect that would have been achieved if the aperture was set slightly wider.

The tech is pretty meh and it's probably overpriced, but that's entirely besides the point.

The problem isn't even the price. Usually I don't even look at the price of a device until I know how good it is, then I start considering, whether it is worth it. And only then, separately, I would consider whether it is worth it to me at that price.

The real catch, before one needs to discuss the camera itself, is the film. I had thought that Polaroid stopped making the original films very long ago. They were quite good, but the modern clones less so. Some comments here in the discussion seem to point to the fact, that these new films are quite inferior. And that unfortunately seals the case for me (and probably many others). A camera with original quality Polaroid films would have sold well, disregarding its price. After all every single short is extremely expensive. But unfortunately, this seems to be a technology lost to mankind.

I would honestly expect it to be able to capture digital versions of the images too for that money.

In that case, addons to polaroidize your smartphone (printer for smartphone) seems like a much better idea since you already carry a large set of controls to influence an output in your favorite apps, and already designed with the outset of limited optics (e.g. fake bokeh), and indeed that product already exists. You’ll also have digital copies to reproduce the Polaroids at will (multiple friends/family etc)

An ex of mine had a Polaroid, and had taken hundreds of pictures with friends and family, all cherished and passed to loved ones.

There's something special and somehow human about small, candid, imperfect photos that hits just right on memory lane and evokes nostalgia. It's more than just what it presents, it's about what it represents, and about the experience itself.

It stops being just a photo. Looking at it and going down memory lane is an experience in and of itself. You get to live that with your eyes, your fingers, your ears, and your nose even, and at the same time you can share them with others. At the same time you evoke the feelings and experiences from when you took it.

Every time you look at that picture you don't just remember what it depicts, you also experience every other time you experienced it.

That's just something no digital photo will ever be able to capture.

But I still had a big 8x10 field camera that I would take portraits with. DSLRs totally took over the film world...and I would NEVER go back to 35mm or even medium format. But you can't get the same thing with digital that an 8x10 platinum contact print from a large format camera can give you. That's really the only time I can see using "obsolete" tech in photography. These Polaroid things can ALL be simulated in digital. Are they instant? No. Which is good.

And for adults that want to take a few risqué photos they are great as they are easier to keep track of than their digital cousins.

I mean I just go done scanning all my predigital photos because analog photos suck. Why would anybody want this?

Edwin Land was the Steve Jobs of that era, the SX70 was the iPod of that era. His Wikipedia page: a pathetic 3,000 words. Dieter Rams (another Jobsian figure) doesn't figure much better, but nothing he ever designed was as big as the SX70, as brilliant as he was. And Land was actual scientist, he made meaningful technologies for WW2, he's practically a war hero, and yet, who the fuck knows who he is outside of Walter Isaacson readers?

Polaroid.com picked some cool photographers. It feels like social media adjacent stuff without being so low brow. I'm surprised they didn't do Elsa Dorfman. They are missing a lot of opportunities with the heritage. Of course they didn't show me a Andy Warhol, but then again, they probably don't have the rights to do that.

If you're going to be a heritage brand, you ought to think how to equip the greats, the Weegees and the Diane Arbuses, who could surely make interesting stuff with a Polaroid. But if they lived today, they'd use a D700 and an ultrawide, a DSLR composes a lot better than an LCD screen or an EVF and sensor technology has practically peaked in 2014 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RyiS-mrp1c). The real problem is that Apple is so painfully apolitical, social media photography on iPhones is the layperson equivalent of crapstraction, so they'll never deliver something advertises that it's for "getting the shot," they'll stick to advertising that it's for "getting the shot [of the totally uncontroversial everyman thing that is personally interesting / sentimental only to you]." You know, something consumerist and literally disposable, like a polaroid.

I also looked and take photos and then again looked at those photos. These people just take photos and never and never look at those photos usually again.