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| A clever inside job for 1979: But how much in Irving Erlichman's patent could be replaced today with better modern digital solutions? |
If you don't want a print immediately, you just release the activating button. Then the image is stored on the tape and you go on to your next picture. At any time you can press a button to rewind the tape, view the stored tape images and reprint. When the tape is full, you interchange it with another.
The electronics, the two motors for the tape unit and printer are powered by a flat battery. Most of the electronics for the camera are housed in what appears to be an easily replaceable module.
As luck, fate and history would have it, one year after the patent filing, Land retired as president and CEO in 1980, or more accurately, was removed because of his financially disastrous venture into Polavision instant movies. At the same time he had originally introduced the first Polaroid camera years before, he promised instant movies as well, a vision that never left him, even when video made Polavision obsolete from its very birth. One gross mistake apparently spelled finish to Land's Polaroid career, no matter his many past triumphs. Without Land there were no more great ventures, no more Land pulling fantastic new cameras from his pocket at stockholders meetings, thus forcing his production department to meet near impossible delivery dates.
The magician was gone and not be to recalled. Polaroid would stumble along, reexamining and even reintroducing instant picture camera designs Land had previously discarded. But none showed the fires of Land genius. I tackled the remaining Polaroid executives whenever possible. "Why not make the Erlichman camera?" I persisted. Not one executive ever told me it wouldn't work or be a success. Instead executives insisted that stockholders would never stand for the curtailing of dividends that developing, distributing and promoting the Erlichman camera would entail. But I suspect the executives were also thinking of their own pots of gold remaining intact at the end of their own retirement rainbows.
In 1980, how close was the camera to being a reality right then? Erlichman told me about 80%. I leave it to all of you how many primitive items in Erlichman's 26-year-old patent could be replaced today with modern substitutes.
How many other R&D departments in U.S. firms may be sitting on Erlichman-style, possibly sensational products that will never see the light of day because company executives for their own reasons might not wish to spend the monies needed to produce them.
Where color came from: A color transfer sheet packed with each cartridge of printing paper would have had three subtractive colors in strips. When print head needles apply pressure, colors get pressed through to print paper.
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