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If you had walked by Polaroid's Headquarters in 1979 you might have heard two things - 1) a bumping noise of heads rolling down the steps and 2) a sound of a wake lapping against the shore, caused by a departing ship being missed. But why?
Two years previously Polaroid had launched an 'instant' movie film format on an unsuspecting world. It was almost instant, you could watch your film 90 seconds after shooting, using a special viewer-processor. It was called 'Polavision'.
One glance at the camera that used Polavision gave some clue as to the thinking behind it.
The camera bore more than a passing resemblance to the new fangled video of the era. Whilst video cameras in the late 70's were not incredibly large, they weren't camcorders, that is, the recorder component was a separate item from the camera and usually carried around on a belt on the cameramen's waist, there was also usually a separate battery too - so the whole ensemble was very cumbersome, very expensive and not light either!
By comparison cine cameras were incredibly lightweight and cheap.
Someone at Polaroid must have seen this situation and spotted a niche for a cheap lightweight movie camera whose results you could view almost instantly.
What they hadn't seen was that video would dominate the domestic film making scene so rapidly, aided in not small measure by the introduction of the camcorder and smaller video tapes such as video8 and VHS-C. By the time Polavison came onto the scene the film based market was already loosing ground to the video upstart.
The Polavision idea put 40 feet of Super8 footage inside a proprietary cartridge, this cartridge also contained the chemicals needed to process the film.
Inserting the film onto the dedicated Polavision player would allow the film to be processed.
The idea, on paper, wasn't that bad, so what went wrong?
Apart from arriving on the market at least five years too late, corners seemed to be cut at every turn. The camera was initially to be made by Bell & Howell, but inspection of the eventual model would reveal that the production camera was made in Austria by Eumig. The lens was modest (a 2x zoom) and appeared underspecified compared to all rival Super8 cameras with the exception of the camera provided with the Agfa Family.
Polaroid had been presented with an opportunity to produce a film that would last longer than the 3 minutes and twenty seconds obtainable with the normal Super8 50foot reel. However opting for only 40 feet of film meant that Polavison cartridges ran for only two and a half minutes.
The fact that the film remained trapped inside the cartridge meant it couldn't be edited and had no potential for sound either - this alienated serious film makers and Polaroid would have to fall back on the mainstream public - a public already embracing video tape technology.
The upshot was that Polavision sold in embarrassingly small numbers and ended up being sold off at very low prices. It was considered to be one of the biggest follies in an industry littered with ideas that somehow failed to make the grade

The results of the system were unremarkable. To the casual observer the films appeared to be unexposed, only closer inspection revealed that the very dense footage contained an image. The films had a 'grain' unlike that of any other film brand and closer in appearance to the dots on a colour television screen. This appeared to borrow technology used by Dufay in their early (prewar) Dufaycolour films. The size of the grain and the darkness of the image meant that the footage shot could not be successfully intercut with other film brands and restricted the format to the small projection box unit.
This was not the product to send a shiver through the corridors of power at Kodak or Fuji