I used to prowl Goodwill and garage sales for old Polaroid cameras as a kid. The film was expensive, and often the cameras needed small repairs and ample cleaning. But there was something charming about the rickety, toylike cameras. Half the time, the old film and slightly busted camera yielded fuzzy, oddly colored photos. The rest of the time, the cameras delivered tiny, perfect works of art. Either way, they were worthy of framing — or, at the very least, securing to the refrigerator.
So when I stepped into Polaroid’s booth in Las Vegas at the Consumer Electronics Showcase in January and was greeted by a giant, room-size version of its new throwback instant-print camera, I struggled to contain my 11-year-old self’s enthusiasm. Standing front and center was a nearly 6-foot-tall re-creation of Polaroid’s latest release, the OneStep 2. The original OneStep was released in 1977, and it was the company’s first one-click camera. It had a single button and a motor that would spit out your photo. While it was far from Polaroid’s first camera, it was the one with which the brand became synonymous. One take, one click, one photo.
Polaroid’s homage to its past didn’t end with the enormous (nonfunctional; I asked) OneStep 2. Wandering inside the company’s setup at CES was like stepping into an Instagram playground from the past. Instead of using iPhones, everyone was shooting with OneStep 2s, and the photos were backdropped by bold and brightly colored patterns. Massive renditions of Polaroid prints with that iconic white frame hung above us; every primary color washed over the space. For a moment, it seemed like everyone was content to forget the phones shoved in their back pockets; the cameras, with their whirring motors and the photos they spit out, were more captivating.
In an age when Instagram has altered the photography world, instant-print cameras are conquering the digital era. Sales of DSLRs and point-and-shoot digital cameras are down; high-end cameras with interchangeable lens devices saw only a small uptick last year, failing to reach the growth of previous years. Broadly, iPhones satiate the average user interested in digital photography. Yet the instant-print shooter—the lowest-tech camera available—has won over many. It’s projected that the market will reach $1.8 billion in revenue within the next three years.
Thanks to the arrival of Fujifilm’s Instax in the United States in 2008 and Polaroid’s recent resuscitation, consumer infatuation with digital cameras has dissipated as quickly as it arose in the previous decade. Polaroid, Fujifilm, Kodak, and a handful of smaller, experimental cameras have capitalized on the millennial’s fondness for nostalgia — and as unlikely as it may seem, instant printing might have the iPhone partially to thank for its revival. Instant printing is both a reaction and complement to an overly digitized life.
Polaroid, of course, first made instant-print cameras popular. The company’s first iteration, introduced in 1948, was an immediate success and didn’t face any competitors for years. By 1956, fewer than 10 years after its first instant-print camera hit the market, Polaroid sold its millionth unit. Polaroid kept innovating: In the 1960s, the company introduced colored film; in the ’70s and ’80s, it launched the models most are familiar with, like the Polaroid Land Camera and the Spectra System. Eventually other manufacturers caught on, but Polaroid dominated up until the early aughts thanks to its patents, which didn’t allow competitors to enter the market. In the ’80s, Polaroid used that leverage to shove Kodak out of the arena. Around the same time, Polaroid and Fuji were engaged in patent litigation; an eventual deal to end the suit gave Polaroid access to some of Fujifilm’s research and development.
In 1998, though, the patents expired. Fujifilm launched the Instax line that year in Japan and Europe, though it did not enter the U.S. market until 2008. By that point, Polaroid had filed for bankruptcy, and Fujifilm was positioned to dominate with the Instax. Kodak introduced the Printomatic series last year, and smaller companies like Lomography entered the space as well.
Currently, Fujifilm’s Instax line are the most common, best-selling cameras of them all. They range from $55 to $135. It’s most accurately described as adorable. Its body has curved edges and it’s as bubbly as an inanimate object can be—a great aesthetic departure from the boxiness of the classic Polaroid (which, in Polaroid’s defense, is more of a retro look). It comes in a variety of trendy colors: lime green, ice blue, and (of course) a pink that looks awfully familiar. Like its competitors, Instax cameras are all easy to use and require just one click; some have add-ons like selfie mirrors. A recent Instax release, the Square SQ10, is a higher-end instant-print device (it costs $230) that also functions as a simple digital camera (it has an LCD screen and a microSD card slot) and prints larger, square photos, versus the smaller, narrower prints produced by other Instaxes. Fujifilm is doubling down on the square shape with the release of the Square SQ6 this week. (The new shape is not without controversy: Fujifilm and Polaroid are in a legal dispute over the matter.)
According to Fujifilm, international Instax sales quickly climbed from its release in 1998 until it suddenly dropped in 2002, when small, relatively inexpensive, digital point-and-shoots had become common. The end of print photography seemed nigh. Kodak and Polaroid suffered during the digital point-and-shoot craze, while Fujifilm weathered it thanks to strong international sales and the company’s more diverse portfolio, which included X-ray imaging and video technology.
By 2008, Polaroid had ceased production of its instant-printing cameras and film, though it partnered with Zink (Zink, which stands for “zero-ink,” is based on ink-free thermal printing technology) on a line of printing products, including its own mobile instant-printing cameras. The Zink cameras proved less popular than the originals. The photos they produced were lower quality and lacked the cachet of the original Polaroid prints. (Polaroid still partners with Zink on some of its printing cameras now, though they are on the lower end of the company’s offerings.) Polaroid filed for bankruptcy a second time in 2008 and sold its assets to a holding company.
One group of fans wouldn’t let Polaroid go. The Impossible Project, led by Florian Kaps, bought the last Polaroid factory and its production equipment, leased the last functional plant, and bought back Polaroid’s brand and assets from the holding company. In 2010, the Impossible Project began selling film for existing Polaroid cameras as well as new camera products. One of the most popular products was the Impossible Instant Lab: a pop-up device that you set your iPhone in. It took a picture of what appeared in the phone’s viewfinder, acted like a dark room, and printed out a Polaroid of your photo at the end. (I owned one.)
Then, in 2017, the group that owned the Impossible Project bought the holding company that owned the Polaroid brand. The team joined the company it initially intended to honor. Polaroid rebranded its instant-printing division as Polaroid Originals and released a new camera, the OneStep 2 of CES fame. The company also introduced the Polaroid Pop, which uses the less expensive Zink film to print.
Fujifilm’s Instax is among the best-selling cameras on the market. No qualifiers needed. In its 2016 fiscal year (ending March 2017; fiscal year 2017 numbers aren’t available yet), Fujifilm sold 6.6 million Instax cameras and printers; the company says it plans to sell 7.5 million this fiscal year. For comparison, the entire digital camera market—point-and-shoots, DSLRs, mirrorless lens cameras, Canons, Nikons, Sonys—sold 18.91 million units in 2017. The Instax is Amazon’s top seller among all cameras.
Still, Polaroid’s nostalgic hold on consumers can’t be discounted. The two are very much in competition—and they’re still battling it out. In November 2017, shortly after Polaroid’s holdings had been bought back, the company threatened to file a lawsuit against Fujifilm for infringement based on the fact it was creating instant-print film with borders like those on Polaroid film. “Unable to return to profitability through product sales, defendants now seek to generate revenue from what remains of the Polaroid IP portfolio,” Fujifilm’s complaint stated. The dispute has yet to be settled.
Much of the infighting between the big-market players hinges on strict patent law enforcement, but what it indicates is much more significant to photography than the legal battles. Instant-print photography is not a frivolous pastime, but a massive, moneymaking business each of them would like to own for themselves.
Just because the legacy companies like Polaroid, Fujifilm, and Kodak are still big players in the instant-printing market, doesn’t mean it’s entirely without new innovators or innovation. Prynt is one company competing with the photography giants.
I first encountered the company and its CEO, Clément Perrot, in 2015 at their hip San Francisco warehouse office. The company is a hardware startup competing in an industry crowded with legacy names. The bare space was filled with little more than a few desks, a plush couch, and, of course, Prynt prints scattered about.
Prynt is a camera that doubles as a phone case that connects via a built-in port and prints photos using the case’s accompanying app. There’s also an augmented-reality element, which allows you to scan the printed photos and watch them come to life inside your phone’s screen.
Since I was introduced to Prynt’s first-generation device—which was fun, albeit large and clunky—the company has expanded internationally, found distribution in Urban Outfitters, and raised $7 million in series-A funding in November 2016. In 2017 it refined the product and launched the Prynt Pocket—a smaller version that acts more like a portable iPhone dock than a clip-on. The same year, it grew its business 60 percent over the previous year. “It hasn’t been easy every day, but we’re definitely lucky to choose a market for consumer hardware that is doing pretty well,” Perrot says.
Other hardware startups haven’t been as lucky. Often, they target niche markets that will never reach the requisite level of demand, or they target markets prone to saturation. This is what happened with once-trendy products like 360-degree action cameras and wearable fitness trackers. Both are creative hardware ventures that either physically or digitally connected to smartphones. GoPro, the biggest name in action cams, overinvested in its drone division, and was subsequently plagued by high R&D costs, technical failures, and an inundation of cheaper competitors. Fitness trackers were subjected to overcrowding. Once the Fitbit was introduced, competitor after competitor followed.
Ultimately, both cameras and fitness trackers became obsolete because iPhones copied and adopted the technology. Apple introduced fitness tracking with iOS 8 and then also with the Apple Watch and watchOS. While the iPhone couldn’t qualify as an action or drone cam on the GoPro level, Apple has massively increased its video capabilities and use cases. The iPhone is now waterproof, has much-improved image stabilization and video editing features, and a higher burst rate.
The iPhone can’t equal FitBits’ and GoPros’ core functions, but for many consumers, it’s not worth investing in yet another product, and what the iPhone can do is good enough. But one thing it can’t and probably won’t do is print photos. “It’s not a market that really can be eaten by the big beast, the smartphone,” says Perrot of instant-print cameras. “Instant-printing cameras go against and are very complementary to the way people use smartphones; you’ve got thousands of photos on your phone and you never look at them, so you need something to take those memories out of your phone and into the real world.”
You need your phone to incessantly capture every moment, and you need your Prynt—or Polaroid or Instax—to decide which of those make their way out of the digital world and into your real, physical one. The growth of the iPhone and its position as consumers’ de facto camera carved out a space for devices that transform a digital artifact into a tangible one. Perrot added, “In the ’90s, you received tons of mail in your mailbox, and you didn’t even care or look at it,” he says. “But every time you received an email, you were really excited. And now you receive tons of email and you don’t care about them. Once you receive a physical letter, a postcard, you’re so excited.”
Nostalgia, we’ve learned, is an effective marketing tool, as seen in music, fashion, and technology. The record player, old-school video games, and film and instant-printing cameras have all experienced temporary deaths at the hands of new devices, but they’ve also each enjoyed new life thanks to a generation of digitally native consumers who find new magic in outdated technology.
A widely cited 2014 study found that nostalgia weakens our attachment to money—in different experiments, people who were exposed to nostalgic elements were likely to pay more for products. “Process evidence indicated that nostalgia’s weakening of the desire for money was due to its capacity to foster social connectedness,” the study’s abstract explains. “Nostalgia may be so commonly used in marketing because it encourages consumers to part with their money.” The researchers go so far as to suggest that in times of economic recession, advertisers can rely on nostalgia campaigns. It seems that nostalgia is market-proof.
But that would indicate that the people most taken with analog products are those who experienced them the first time around. And for some products, that seems to be true: Millennials who grew up with Nintendos are here for its new handheld device; ’90s girls still fawn over Lisa Frank. But instant printing is a comparatively ancient technology, one that its current, most passionate buyers have no personal memories of. Perhaps the first part of the researchers’ conclusions are more applicable in this case—the desire for social connectedness is a powerful force for the instant-printing market.
“While there is certainly a nostalgic movement among millennials, Instax has sustained growth far beyond that,” Fujifilm’s spokespeople told me. “Instax has grown in acceptance as a social communication device rather than a camera.” Martin Franklin, Polaroid’s head of global marketing, acknowledges that the company’s slow but steady growth is in part thanks to an insatiable consumer appetite for nostalgia. But he also believes it is something of a reaction to current attitudes. “Millennials are growing up in a complicated, complex world, and I think when they look back to things like Polaroid in the ’80s, it seems like a sweeter, simpler time,” he told me when we met at CES. “And there’s quite an appeal for that type of thing.”
Fujifilm used to be a stalwart of CES. The company’s booth was usually wedged somewhere near Polaroid and Canon, but this year, Fujifilm was nowhere to be found, opting out of the convention floor. CES doesn’t make sense for Fujifilm anymore. Photokina, a digital-photography-focused trade show next scheduled for September 2018, is a more significant forum. Fujifilm hasn’t had a presence on the CES floor since 2016. The company chooses to meet privately with reporters in a hotel on the Strip instead. Fujifilm doesn’t quite fit at CES, anyway.
Photography has endured an almost unimaginable amount of change. Not only has the way we take photos evolved, but the way we share them and consume them, and what and how much they mean, have transformed as well. Instant printing is a conduit to photography’s past. The cameras managed to bridge the gap between analog and digital without alienating consumers. Instant-print devices offer balance to our data-sucking smartphone photo galleries.
Younger generations have less and less connection to anything analog; the iPhone became the digital camera with Instagram as its photo book. Snapchat—despite its recent struggles—hugely changed how everyone under 30 thinks about photos. Over time, pictures have become less and less precious, and Snapchat further eliminated some of the preciousness of photography by making it ephemeral; moments became easily replaceable.
Instant printing is a corrective to all that. Usually when we talk about throw-away culture, we’re talking about waste and sustainability, but the topic also applies to an attitude that’s developed in part because of creating digital media. The continued and increasing success of instant-print cameras feels like a direct reaction to that. Instagram, with its manufactured nostalgia, might conjure a feeling of creating keepsakes, but instant printing actually creates them.