They weren’t the best thing he ever did, or the one which we’ll cherish the most. But with the sad news of the passing of James Garner, it’s worth pausing to remember the commercials he did in the late 1970s and early 1980s for Polaroid. And–this being Technologizer–it’s how we’ll memorialize him here. When it […]
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The Ghostbusters Polaroids
Posted by Harry McCracken on June 6, 2014 at 10:11 am
Any interesting photograph is more interesting still–or at least far more evocative of a particular era–if it happens to be a Polaroid. That’s my deeply-held belief, anyhow–which is why I’ve blogged in the past about Polaroid images of John F. Kennedy and the Apple-1 computer. (I also told the story of Polaroid’s SX-70 camera in […]
Polaroid’s New/Old School Camera
Posted by Harry McCracken on November 9, 2011 at 12:04 pm
Polaroid news! PCWorld’s Robert S. Anthony reports on the new Z340, a new digital camera from Polaroid that, more than any of its previous digicams, hearkens back to its instant-photography glory days. It not only spits out prints, but can make them look like classic Polaroids, complete with the off-center white border.
How Polaroid Failed to Introduce the Kindle in the Mid-1940s
Posted by Harry McCracken on June 13, 2011 at 12:12 am
Vannevar Bush (1890-1974) is justly famous for his 1945 Atlantic essay “As We May Think.” It proposes a device called a memex which bears an uncanny resemblance to a personal computer connected to the World Wide Web–or at least as close as anyone could come five decades before the Web changed the world. As described […]
Remember Polaroid? That Company That Made Unsanitary 3D Glasses?
Posted by Harry McCracken on June 10, 2011 at 9:32 am
In “Polaroid’s SX-70: The Art and Science of the Nearly Impossible,” I had a lot to say about a single fascinating Polaroid camera. But almost everything Polaroid did was fascinating, and it didn’t all involve instant photography. I came across a lot of stuff that didn’t fit into the SX-70 story. Such as this… Before […]
Polaroid’s SX-70: The Art and Science of the Nearly Impossible
Posted by Harry McCracken on June 8, 2011 at 3:00 am
What makes a gadget great? You might argue that it’s determined at least in part by how many lives the product in question touches. Back in 2005, when I helped choose a list of the fifty greatest gadgets of the past fifty years, we ranked the Sony Walkman as #1 and Apple’s iPod as #2. Fabulous […]
New Polaroid Products. Sigh!
Posted by Harry McCracken on December 30, 2009 at 11:40 am
Wow–no sooner do I publish a story bemoaning the diminished state of the once-proud Polaroid name than the news breaks that jWIN (owners of the sorta-well-known iLuv brand) are licensing the right to make Polaroid stuff. The company plans to offer “peripherals for PC’s, console games, mobile phones, audio/video as well as telephones, certain laptop […]
Polaroid Cameras Are Back! Briefly!
Posted by Harry McCracken on August 20, 2009 at 10:23 am
I never expected to write as much about Polaroid cameras as I have at Technologizer, but the little guys continue to make more news than some gadgets which are still in production. Dazed Digital is reporting that the Polaroid preservers at The Impossible Project have saved 700 old-stock One600 cameras and will be selling them, […]
Polaroid: A Great Name Taken in Vain
Posted by Harry McCracken on April 17, 2009 at 3:27 pm
Maybe it’s because I consider the SX-70 one of the very greatest gadgets ever invented. Or perhaps it’s because I grew up a few miles from the company’s headquarters in Cambridge, Mass. Whatever the reason, I feel protective about the Polaroid brand–and boy, am I sorry to see what’s happened to it over the past […]
The Best of Technologizer
Posted by Harry McCracken on May 31, 2014 at 10:34 am
Most technology journalism has an exceedingly short shelf life. That’s O.K.: It reflects the breakneck pace of the tech industry, which is always anxious to move on to the next big thing. Most of the stories below, however, concern themselves with history rather than breaking events. They were published on Technologizer’s original 2008-2012 version and […]