Polaroids died a quiet death in 2008, when the company stopped making the film. But the company isn't fading away. At CES this year, they've unveiled a replacement product: A digital camera with an attached printer that creates instant pictures.
The $200 Pogo camera, co-developed with Zink, has been almost two years in the making. It grafts a promising mobile printer, introduced last summer, to a small digital camera. The first hands-on look appeared today, and the results are fairly interesting: The 2"x3" prints hark back to the evocatively fuzzy Polaroids, emerging with a blue-ish tint after a minute of printing onto special paper (the printer itself is ink-less). But, when the camera goes on sale this spring, will it be successful?
Instant printing is here to stay, but I doubt the Pogo camera will catch on for a simple reason: The original Polaroids were alluring because you never knew what you were going to get when the picture finally appeared. And if there's anything that the digital camera (and digital gear in general) has eliminated, it's unpredictability. If you want to see how a picture turned out, you just look at the screen. That was the biggest draw of a Polaroid; with digital pictures, there's no anxious curiosity pushing you towards the extra step of printing.
That's a shame -— as Andre 3000 of Outkast will happily tell you, shaking a Polaroid picture is what elevated a dumb piece of tech into a cultural ritual, and made the product truly memorable. In these days of nearly perfected technology, we've got less opportunity to make those sentimental attachments. But I'm guessing a truly great product designer will soon invent a brilliantly cheap, crappy product that succeeds precisely because it isn't perfect.
Related Stories: | Topics:Innovation, Technology, Design, Polaroid Pogo, Instant cameras, Polaroids, Zink Pogo, Cameras, Consumer Electronics, Entertainment, Hip-Hop and Rap, Music |
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Recent Comments | 4 Total
January 8, 2009 at 12:24pm by Eric Stites
I disagree that the Pogo may not catch on. Sure, unpredictability has been eliminated but when you take a digital picture, you take the picture or electronic data with you. Wouldn't it be nice to give your subject a little gift on the spot? I would think this would have great potential in many markets like photojournalism, youth sports, school photography, weddings/events, etc. I really think the Pogo will catch on because the real reason people loved Polaroids was the ability to give your photo subject the instant gratification of a snap shot gift they can take home with them.
January 8, 2009 at 12:38pm by Cliff Kuang
Hey Eric---Thanks for reading and thanks for your input. You may be right--We'll see how it all shakes out (so to speak). But my bet is that while mementos are fun and gift-giving is an eternally valuable thing, a big chunk of the fun in immediate sharing has been eaten up by Facebook and Flickr. That is, the gift of a photo you can take with you isn't so valuable in itself anymore, when you know you can find a ton of pictures of the same event on your friends' profile pages. And I think the ubiquity of digital photos has made hard-copy pictures a bit less alluring. Either way, it'll be interesting to watch exactly how people's behaviors change in the wake of these subtle shifts. If this camera gets sexier, smaller, and cheaper, it might definitely explode.
January 8, 2009 at 5:12pm by Starry Man
I think Pogo is a great idea and it can be successful if they can bring down the cost of the film/print. Having two digital point and shoots, a lunky Canon Digital SLR, immersed in Facebook, Flickr, and multiply... gigs and gigs of photos, I'd still like the option to have instant prints. I'll give Polaroid a free idea... make a camera back add-on to be used on DSLRs that can use the instant print technology. If you don't get greedy with the print media... Now we are talking.
January 9, 2009 at 5:46pm by Michele Bowman
Good article, but I respectfully disagree: the allure of the Polaroid wasn't it's unpredictability. as this FringeHog post (http://fringehog.com/2008/02/26/the-magic-of-polaroid/) suggests,the "magic" of a Polaroid was the instant gratification of holding in one's hand a tangible artifact of a memory.