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On October 22, 1979, during the dawn of early digital still camera prototypes, Irving Erlichman filed a patent for a "a hand-held, self-processing, electronic imaging camera" whose features, capabilities and sheer daring of concept went far beyond anyone else's envisioned camera, not only then, but perhaps even now. No, Erlichman wasn't a young geek off his rocker, but one of a small group of brilliant inventors working for Dr. Edwin H. Land, and the patent was indeed assigned to the Polaroid Corporation.
What combination of features could deserve such accolades? Picture a digital camera with integral printer producing as many 3 x 3 inch color prints of the same image, either immediately, or if you chose, at any later time, thanks to an interchangeable memory. Each picture snapped would first appear on a viewing panel to be examined, printed, duplicated, filed or destroyed. If you'd rather not take time even to look at the pictures snapped, you could bypass all of them and do your editing and or duplicating later.
The digital do everything camera-printer:
If Land hadn't been kicked out, would this camera have saved the Polaroid company?
Listing desirable features is easy. However building them into a possible working camera-printer is another matter. But Erlichman's camera was no pie-in-the-sky dream. The camera-printer would be about the same size as one of today's Polaroid Spectra cameras, but stand vertically rather than horizontally. Here's my abbreviated description of the camera written originally in 1980 as gleaned from the patent:
Both the front and rear of the camera aree hinged. You insert a standard tape cassette in the front and place a printing cassette in the rear holding 10 printing sheets plus a color-transfer sheet.
To take a picture, you view through the finder and focus. By pushing the activating button the optical image formed by the lens is separated by a dichroic mirror and prism system or filters, into primary red, green and blue electronic image signals. These signals are fed to one or more CCD devices and then into a memory and finally to an LCD or similar viewing panel the same size as the final print. At the same time, the image is fed electronically to a tape recorder which records one single image at a time on three separate tracks, one of each for the primary colors... You can bypass the image you see, print it immediately, and/or store it on the tape cassette.
To make a print, you move the printer handle at the rear from right to left. This causes an inside finger to engage a perforation on a printing sheet in the print cassette and draws the sheet down to the printing drum at the bottom of the camera. At the same time the color transfer sheet is moved downwards slightly by another finger. The transfer sheet is composed of narrow strips of secondary color pigments or dyes (cyan, magenta or yellow). For each print to be made, the transfer sheet is pulled down one set of three strips so each print has a fresh set of color pigments available...
When the printer handle reaches its start position, an electronic additive-to-subtractive signal converter converts the three primary color signals from the tape to three corresponding subtractive color signals. These are fed to three printing transducers whose actuating mechanisms resemble three tiny needles. As the printing paper revolves on the printing drum, the three tiny needles put pressure on the color transfer sheet and press color from the sheet onto the printing paper. The colored dots from the three needles are superimposed on one another much like images created in regular halftone printing. In highlight areas, the dots are small; in shadow areas they are large. The resolution of a possible print is given at 200 lines/inch (about 20% better than on a standard TV image). Total printing time is one minute.
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