Family gatherings used to seem incomplete without a Polaroid camera. But the magic of seeing pictures 60 seconds after pushing a button faded in the early 1980s, when automatic 35-mm cameras and one-hour processing labs transformed conventional photography into a better-than-instant phenomenon. Polaroid's sales of instant cameras have fallen from 6.6 million units in 1980 to 3.8 million last year.
Adapting to the change in fortune, Polaroid announced last week that it plans to add regular film to its continuing line of instant-camera products. The company, based in Cambridge, Mass., hopes to wrest a fraction of the $7 billion-a-year world market...