It’s the kind of story that can form the foundation of a company’s identity and, if they’re lucky, the plot of their eventual fictional biopic: a brand that dominates one type of technology takes a bold, risky step into the great unknown so it can lead its industry into future.

It’s a great story…when it’s successful.

When it’s not, well, that courageous grab for the brass ring of new technology can plague a company for years. That’s why you probably forgot about the Polaroid Polavision camera. And why your likely points of reference for Polaroid are their recent licensing deals that have returned their instant cameras to an ironic, kitschy zombie existence that only seems to rub the wound of its attempt to redefine home movies at the end the 70s.

Polavision was billed as Polaroid’s biggest and most important innovation to date, having been in development for over a decade. Just as the company had pioneered the instant camera, it would enter the 1980s as the leader in instant video. That was the plan, anyway. Polavision was a unique film production system consisting of a portable device camerafilm cartridge and a proprietary viewer that would process the film (using a new type of additive color process that allowed for instant development) and then display what was captured. Polaroid co-founder Edwin Land saw Polavision as a personal crusade. Despite some internal resistance (primarily from Polaroid president Bill McCune), Land introduced the camera at Polaroid’s annual shareholder meeting in 1977, and it hit store shelves that same year, supported by advertisements featuring plenty of poorly played tennis and aging Hollywood legends like Danny Kaye.

From the beginning, however, the problems were obvious. Each film cartridge could only shoot about two and a half minutes of footage. He also couldn’t pick up any sound. Because of its slow film speed, each “film” required enormous amounts of light to successfully process an image. It worked mostly well outside during the day – colors were grainy and muted and there was a lot of “noise” in the image, but you could generally see what was going on. However, indoor shots were often extremely muddy and you could almost forget about shooting anything at night without klieg lights.

Despite its novelty, the Polavision failed to capture the imagination of consumers the way Polaroid’s instant camera did, and initial sales were poor. Making matters worse, JVC and Sony were already on the way to introducing primitive versions of the camcorder in the early 1980s, which even in their early forms surpassed the Polavision in terms of image quality, recording length, and sound-capturing ability .

“Polaroid was a company that absolutely dominated the 20s^th century,” says host Kevin Lieber Popular Science Retro Tech video series. “They were dominating instant photography and they thought the next big thing would be home movies, and that was the Polavision camera—a very ambitious attempt to get into video. And it failed. Really stupid. He died within two years and is seen as the decisive moment for the ultimate downfall of the company.”

Still, for enthusiasts like Lieber, a working Polavision camera is something of a holy grail, just as it was for Edwin Land. However, due to the complexity of not only the film itself, but also the devices needed to shoot and watch it, locating all the pieces in working order became an adventure that would make Indiana Jones proud. Lieber set out to make an episode of Retro Tech on Polavision and – no spoilers – found himself on a three-month odyssey that couldn’t be contained in a typical web video.

“I didn’t expect it (to become such a journey),” he says. “It really turned into a feature documentary because it was one of those pit situations where I just kept digging deeper and deeper…it was an incredible journey to follow .”

The biggest problem was that the film doesn’t have a long shelf life. “The tapes themselves used a reagent similar to that used by instant cameras—a chemical reagent to develop the film,” explains Lieber. “And all that has dried up because 40 years have passed. Chemicals are just dust, basically.”

Undeterred, Lieber tracked down a technology collector nicknamed “Doc” who lived in Austria and had several Polavision film cartridges in cold storage—as well as a camera and even a projection system. Now the question was, “Do any of them still work?” You can watch our video to find out, but suffice it to say, this is far from a simple yes or no answer. It was more like a Russian doll: One man’s crusade to dominate the home video market in 1977 led to another man’s crusade to save a failing company, which in turn led to another man’s mission to to shoot a Polavision video in 2024. It was not successful is almost secondary to the idea that even in failure, innovation and forward thinking should always be supported. And you never know if this bold idea will be a technological footnote or the bastion of a new future.

Or maybe just a good story.