Epilogue

• Author: Ronald K. Fierstein
• Profession: Lawyer on the team of litigators from the prestigious patent law firm of Fish & Neave
• Pages: 515-534

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CHAPT ER 29

EPILOGUE

Of course, the great irony in this story is the fact that, despite being the

technological marvel of its time, instant photography is now, essentially,

obsolete and swept away to the vagaries of eBay and local flea markets.

And the two companies who fought this epic battle have followed that

technology to the business scrap heap. The demise of instant photography

came in two sequential waves.

First, in the 1970s came a new generation of 35-millimeter cameras

and their high-quality images, used by professionals for decades but made

accessible to amateurs thanks to features like autofocusing and autoexpo-

sure. Even more importantly, at the same time, the convenience of film

processing grew exponentially. The number of local photo “minilabs”

grew from 1,000 to 14,000 in the 1980s. Moreover, the speed of the pro-

cess increased as well. As Judge Mazzone pointed out in his opinion in

the damages trial, “Consumers could now get high quality prints in a very

short time, cutting into instant’s traditional domain.”1 Increasingly afford-

able 35-millimeter cameras drove instants from peak sales in 1978 to a

rapidly declining market in the following years. Despite a brief period of

optimism at Polaroid in 1986, caused not only by its victory in the courts

but also by the introduction of the very successful Spectra instant camera,

the long-term downward trend continued.2

The second, and perhaps ultimately more devastating, wave came in

the form of digital photography, the first signs of which actually appeared

as the Polaroid v. Kodak case was coming to trial. In early 1981, Fortune

got wind of something in the industry pipeline. “Further out over the hori-

zon,” it reported, “well beyond any of the camera systems that have Wall

Street guessing today, is the electronic camera, a mouthwatering industry

prospect.”3 In August 1981, Sony announced in Japan what its chairman

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A Triumph of Genius

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and cofounder, Akio Morita, characterized as “the camera of the future”

and “another revolution in image recording,” the first still camera that

uses “electronics and a magnetic disc to capture still pictures.”4 According

to photography analyst William Relyea, this “meant an electronic alter-

native to photography is going to be more competitive earlier than most

people had in mind.”5 Even as Land sat on the witness stand in the fall of

1981, Morita came to America to preview Sony’s “revolutionary Mavica

video still camera.”6 Nonetheless, given that the Sony camera was not

scheduled for release until 1983, and even then at a high projected retail

cost of $1,000, the consensus in the industry was that this new technology

would not “dent consumer markets before 1990.”7

As a result, both Polaroid and Kodak initially resisted the allure of

this new technology and underestimated its long-term impact. Colby

Chandler, Kodak’s president, spoke in 1981 like the leader of a company

built upon conventional silver halide film technology when he reminded

observers that “it remains to be seen whether [an all-electronic] camera

could be offered at mass-market prices and whether the filmless camera

could, or would, offer benefits comparable to those from traditional prod-

ucts.”8 Similarly, Polaroid remained wedded to the technology it had pio-

neered and reportedly “turned down flat” an offer to partner with Japan’s

Hitachi Ltd. on its version of a filmless camera.9 Although it later reversed

course and made a belated foray into “electronic photography,” Polaroid

never became a real player in digital technology, a technology that contin-

ues to dominate amateur photography well into the twenty-first century.10

While neither 35-millimeter nor the early versions of digital photogra-

phy offered the essential immediacy of instant photography—the ability to

have a print of the subject appear in the photographer’s hand seconds after

the shutter is snapped—both gradually relegated Land’s photo-in-a-minute

revelation back to the niche technology that many, including Kodak, first

perceived it to be. This was not enough to sustain a major corporation like

Polaroid. Instant photography turned out to have a lifespan of decades rather

than centuries. Without its visionary founder or a perceptive management

able to steer Polaroid on to a new course, the company gradually eroded

through the 1990s in tandem with the demise of the technology that had

given it life in the first instance. As one business commentator observed,

“a lack of imagination and blind faith in an increasingly irrelevant reality

produced an inevitable outcome.”11 Similarly, Herbert Keppler, publisher of

Modern Photography, noted, “There’s no longer the wonderful old magic

of Polaroid.”12

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