We haven’t had a lot of occasions to take photos in the last year (your sourdough loaf excluded). But as America gets vaccinated, we’ll be getting together to make memories again.
Which is exactly why Polaroid’s latest camera, the Polaroid Go, looks like the perfect product for the moment. It’s billed as the world’s smallest instant analog camera, designed to squeeze into your pocket—albeit with a bit more difficulty than a smartphone—and produce two-inch photo prints the moment you snap the shot.
The biggest challenge to reducing the size of Polaroid cameras is that you can only shrink the system so much and still take photos. “There’s this [internal] mirror at an angle, that basically defines to a large extent how a Polaroid camera looks,” explains Ignacio Germade, chief design officer at Polaroid. (A Polaroid camera’s large, diagonal back houses this mirror, which reflects light from the lens down to the film, while also creating the camera’s unique lean-to silhouette.) “It is a signature, and a design limitation.”
“The optics are pretty unique in the way they bend light, which was a necessary thing to actually make this camera the size it is,” says Smolokowski. “You wouldn’t be able to design a lens like this even 15 years ago. There are advancements in lenses and what you can do with materials to bend light.”
The resulting Go camera is just four inches at its widest point, which for a mechanical system that bounces light through a lens and mirror—and rolls out photos to develop them—is remarkable. In the x-ray photo the team shared, you can see just how tightly the mechanics are packed inside compared to a traditional Polaroid, which is oddly hollow. As a secondary effect to its internal density, Germade says the camera feels heavy for its size, like a high-quality object—even if it’s mostly plastic.
The Polaroid Go will be out on April 27 for $100, with compatible 16-photo film packs that run $20 apiece. “My dream is it will encourage people to go outside more as we open up and the pandemic has less effect on our lives,” says Smolokowski.