Ad for Polaroid Colorpak II in Life Magazine
Toronto. Photographic product makers worked hard at besting one another to capture a larger segment of the ever growing amateur photography market. Typical of the strategy was this May 1969 ad in LIFE magazine touting Polaroid.
The ad emphasizes its inexpensive, technically complex, and super easy to use colour camera! While a Polaroid camera may look complex, most cameras of the era – or any era – are just a shutter, an aperture device, a means to focus, a lens, a sensitive media, and a light tight box to keep the sensitive media and the lens the right distance apart.
As Lipinski says in his 1955 book “Miniature and Precision Cameras” about Leitz’s famous camera, “It can safely be said that the Leica mechanism has evolved around its focal plane shutter. There is hardly anything more in it — there is indeed remarkably little inside a Leica anyway.”
My thanks to my good friend and fellow photographic history buff, George Dunbar, for showing me this ad from the May 30, 1969 issue of LIFE magazine.
