After three years of teasing and a handful of tentative release dates that have come and gone, the Polaroid Socialmatic instant printing digital camera officially has a release date. As in, an actual day... not just a month or quarter.
The long-awaited Polaroid 'Socialmatic' -- a square camera that looks like the Instagram app logo (which was, of course, inspired by a Polaroid camera in the first place) -- is one step closer to an official release. And now that Polaroid brought some prototypes with them to Photokina, the unwieldy digital instant camera is starting to look more and more like a potential flop.
From a design concept to a crowd-funding campaign to a product backed by a major brand, the Polaroid Socialmatic represents an alternative to traditional product development methods. Is crowd-sourced innovation the shakeup that the photography industry needs?
We've known since late 2012 that the Instagram logo lookalike Socialmatic camera would go from concept to reality, and since early 2013 that it would arrive with Polaroid branding, but now Polaroid is giving us specs and announcing that the Socialmatic will arrive in stores this Fall.
Maybe you've read an article or two here regarding Socialmatic. They're the team who brought us the Instagram-inspired instant camera that made uploading images from a tiny device easy, and even allowing users to print their pictures from the device on-the-fly (more on that here).
A few months back we shared the news that, assuming Instagram's trademark lawyers didn't get ahold of it first, the Socialmatic camera would indeed be making an appearance IRL. And now, none other than Polaroid has stepped up to place its name on the Instagram icon turned physical camera.
Do you remember the Instagram Socialmatic? It's a concept camera that made the rounds on the Internet back in May -- a camera that lets people snap photos, share them online, and print them out as squared-shared sticky-note-style instant photos. The camera will soon go from digital concept to physical reality: it's being turned into an actual camera, which is a proposed release date of mid-2013.
A week ago we shared a funny "leaked advertisement" for a fictional camera called the Instagram Snap. The video poked fun at the possibility that Instagram would use their $1 billion buyout from Facebook to build a ridiculous "real-world" camera -- basically a Polaroid camera with "sharing" features (passing a photo to another person by hand) and "filters" (coffee filter = spill coffee on your picture). Ironically enough though, a concept of just such a camera has recently come out, and it actually seems somewhat appealing.
Concept designer Antonio De Rosa of ADR Studio has created what he believes is a route Apple might take if it were to design a standalone camera.
Oh GoPro, the action cam crown must rest uneasy on thy sweaty brow. CES has been flush with announcements of new entrants in the wearable camera market, and now Polaroid joins the scrum with a handful of new models. (All manufactured by Polaroid licensee and troubled asset specialist C&A Marketing.)
When BBC Future approached design company Conran with a challenge to "redesign any object," Senior Product Designer Jared Mankelow chose the camera. He believes that the form factor of our cameras hasn't kept pace with their function, and so his square creation harkens back to the film cameras of old, while simultaneously catapulting the camera into the future.
A couple of weeks ago two concepts for a "real-life" Instagram camera rolled across our computer screens -- one fake and funny, one real and kind of cool -- but we were pretty certain that neither of them would become a reality any time soon. It seems, however, that we're being proven wrong by ADR Studio's Antonio De Rosa and the crowdsourcing site Indiegogo.