At Long Last, Land's Instant Movies

Polaroid Founder-Chairman Edwin Land is a showman who likes to use his corporation's annual meetings to stage splashy demonstrations of the company's latest instant-photography miracles. Last week he had a stunning new one to display: instant movies, which Polaroid is preparing to market on a limited basis in the fall after 30 years of experimenting. So Land put on a show that lived up to his own dry comment: "Anything worth doing is worth doing to excess." Each of the 3,800 shareholders present in Needham, Mass., got a chance to shoot films of jugglers, clowns and dancing girls, then see the film projected seconds later. Dubbing his new creation Polavision, Land pronounced it "a new technology to relate ourselves to life and to each other." He slipped only once, when he tried to insert a film cassette backward into the new system's camera. He fumbled, got it right and bowed to a round of applause.

Shareholders had more than the new Polavision system to cheer about. The company's instant still-picture cameras, including the Pronto line (the cheapest sells at discount for less than $50) introduced about a year ago, are doing very well. They have prevented archrival Eastman Kodak, the giant of U.S. photography with sales of $5.4 billion, from grabbing as much of the market as expected in its first year in the instant-camera field.* Polaroid's 1976 sales of $950 million missed the magic billion-dollar mark by a shutter click, and its first-quarter 1977 profits jumped 33% over a year earlier. Although Kodak's long-term outlook is good, the company's first-quarter net dropped 20% because of poor sales generally. Kodak has told 1,000 employees, mostly instant-film workers, that they will go on layoff every sixth week. Polaroid's stock sold late last week for about $33, more than double its 1974 low of $14 (though nowhere near its high of almost $150 five years ago); Kodak's stock, at around $63, is barely above its 1974 low of $58.

With the long-heralded Polavision system, Polaroid moves into a market whose potential has been limited by all the fuss attending conventional home movies: the wait for an exposed reel to come back from the developer, setting up a projector and screen, threading film, dimming lights, pulling everyone away from the television set long enough to watch, then putting everything away again. When compared with sales in the giant amateur-still-photography market, home movie sales are small change; annual camera sales have declined from about 1 million units in 19-72 to around 650,000 last year. But Land believes latent demand is there and that Polavision can draw it out, despite a probable total system price of $400 to $700, according to Wall Street guesses. (Polaroid has not yet announced a price.) Says Land: "We feel this is a totally new field, more like television."

Slice of Bread. The system consists of a lightweight, fully automatic camera and a viewing box (both made for Polaroid by an Austrian firm) with a 12-in. TV-like screen, and film-loaded cassettes. The cassette, containing 42 ft. of super 8-size film for nearly three minutes of shooting, is slipped into the camera, exposed, removed and dropped into the viewer like a slice of bread into a toaster. In 90 seconds, the film is processed as it is rewound inside the cassette before being projected on the screen in full color. The cassette then pops up for the viewer "to replace in the library," as Land puts it.

There are some disadvantages. At this time, the process precludes editing because the film cannot be removed from its cassette without breaking it. And the film is set up to be shown on the system's viewer and not on any other projector.

The principle behind the process has been known for decades. The biggest problem that held the system in the labs was the film's slow reaction to light. Polaroid's scientists, however, found a way to speed it up to an acceptable ASA (American Standards Association) rating of 40, adequate for moviemaking outdoors by daylight or indoors with a small floodlight. Land wants to market Polavision with sound, and the film shown at last week's meeting had an unused magnetic sound track, but Land is not satisfied with the quality.

Even if it does take off, analysts doubt that Polavision will contribute much to Polaroid's earnings for years. Says one: "This is a product that has much more scientific and esthetic appeal than commercial significance."

One problem that Polavision apparently will not encounter, at least any time soon, is competition from Kodak. At the Kodak annual meeting, held on the same day as Polaroid's, Chairman Walter Fallon indicated to a generally critical audience that the company is not trying to develop an instant-movie system. Instead, it is concentrating on other goals, including trying to eliminate the flashbulb in still photography by making a whole new series of amateur cameras to use high-speed film. In March Kodak introduced a fast color film with an ASA rating of 400, but so far it can be used only in complex cameras, not most of Kodak's Instamatics.

"Polaroid filed a patent-infringement suit against Kodak's cameras; the two companies are engaged in informal talks that could lead to an out-of-court settlement.

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