PHOTOGRAPHY: At Long Last, Land's Instant Movies

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Slice of Bread. The system consists of a lightweight, fully automatic camera and a viewing box (both made for Polaroid by an Austrian firm) with a 12-in. TV-like screen, and film-loaded cassettes. The cassette, containing 42 ft. of super 8-size film for nearly three minutes of shooting, is slipped into the camera, exposed, removed and dropped into the viewer like a slice of bread into a toaster. In 90 seconds, the film is processed as it is rewound inside the cassette before being projected on the screen in full color. The cassette then pops up for the viewer "to replace in the library," as Land puts it.

There are some disadvantages. At this time, the process precludes editing because the film cannot be removed from its cassette without breaking it. And the film is set up to be shown on the system's viewer and not on any other projector.

The principle behind the process has been known for decades. The biggest problem that held the system in the labs was the film's slow reaction to light. Polaroid's scientists, however, found a way to speed it up to an acceptable ASA (American Standards Association) rating of 40, adequate for moviemaking outdoors by daylight or indoors with a small floodlight. Land wants to market Polavision with sound, and the film shown at last week's meeting had an unused magnetic sound track, but Land is not satisfied with the quality.

Even if it does take off, analysts doubt that Polavision will contribute much to Polaroid's earnings for years. Says one: "This is a product that has much more scientific and esthetic appeal than commercial significance."

One problem that Polavision apparently will not encounter, at least any time soon, is competition from Kodak. At the Kodak annual meeting, held on the same day as Polaroid's, Chairman Walter Fallon indicated to a generally critical audience that the company is not trying to develop an instant-movie system. Instead, it is concentrating on other goals, including trying to eliminate the flashbulb in still photography by making a whole new series of amateur cameras to use high-speed film. In March Kodak introduced a fast color film with an ASA rating of 400, but so far it can be used only in complex cameras, not most of Kodak's Instamatics.