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Instamatics, priced from about $28 to $128 and weighing from 5.6 oz. to 9 oz. Only one inch thick and capable of being tucked into a shirt pocket, they produce remarkably true color prints that are one-third again as large as those processed from the old-style Instamatics, which were more than three times bulkier. The more expensive models automatically control exposure and tell photographers when to use a flash cube. Next week Kodak will turn out the one-millionth new pocket camera, and company chiefs hope to sell 4,000,000 during the first year. So far, they cannot keep up with demand, and there are waiting lists for Instamatics at many stores.
The most startling—and certainly the costliest—of the new generation of cameras is a box of magic from Polaroid, the developer of instant photography. Like all previous Polaroid Land cameras, the compact new camera will almost certainly bear the name of its inventor, Edwin Herbert Land, the founder, president, chairman and research director of Polaroid. Dark-eyed and quite youthful for his 63 years, Land looks every inch the scientific genius. A paradoxical person, he alternates between lives as laboratory recluse and businessman-philosopher. He can be intensely shy and awkwardly unsure in face-to-face conversation. Yet he is capable of spellbinding audiences with glimpses into new scientific frontiers. Land is revered by his employees, stockholders and even his competitors to a greater degree than almost any other corporate chief in the U.S. He so greatly personifies his company that top executives at competing Kodak nearly always refer to the Polaroid Corp. as "he" or "him." Says Kodak Vice President Van Phillips: "Someday Edwin Land will be ranked with Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell." He quickly adds: "And George Eastman" (the Kodak founder).
For the past seven years Land has devoted his life to his new camera. He made the daring gamble of sinking nearly a quarter-billion dollars of Polaroid's money into its development, constructing huge plants before he knew whether the camera would work, or even how it would look. Yet with characteristic disregard for details—sometimes crucial ones—he still has not settled on a model name for the small Polaroid Land camera, which is scheduled to reach dealers' shelves in limited numbers late this fall. Around Polaroid headquarters in Cambridge, Mass., the camera is referred to by its project designation, SX-70, and the film for it already rolling off the assembly lines is being packaged in blank boxes, which will be imprinted when Land finally makes up his mind. The camera is just the first of what eventually will be a whole family of pocket Polaroids.