It was the same team that did the famous "Powers of 10" short a few years later. It included a rousing voiceover by Philip Morrison, an MIT prof who worked on the Manhattan Project but later became a major proponent of nuclear nonproliferation.
This video has a special place in my heart. It effortlessly moves from a commercial to an instructional video to an impressively coherent discussion of how it works before ultimately explaining that the camera is a tool intended to further increase the true potential of humankind.
You can laugh all you want, but years later I cannot watch this without tearing up.
Interesting video. Where did this video play? I'm curious because a 10 minute video in the 70s seems like it would have extremely limited distribution.
This video is great. It's made me really interested in the new camera, and the relative lack of actual information presented about it, in contrast to what's presented in that video, is frustrating. Are there more details available somewhere?
One insight that just now occurred to me is that there's some serious political posturing at work in this video.
Specifically, film in general was strongly biased to favour Caucasian skin tones. It used to be incredibly difficult to take good colour photos of black people.
It's clear that Land wanted to demonstrate that the insanely great dynamic range of Polaroid film was perfectly capable of bringing photography to the black demographic.
>Specifically, film in general was strongly biased to favour Caucasian skin tones
I find it odd to call this "biased". It's about physics: due to light intensity, it will be generally easier to photograph (capture on film or digital sensors) objects that reflect moderate amounts of light with some contrast, than objects that reflect very little light with little contrast.
> Yes, film wasn't sensitive enough for black skin
This was not a constraint of physics or chemistry: Kodak knew it, and they didn't care much for black skin. This was bias because they could fix it, but didn't. Fortunately, Kodak did ended up caring for other brown things: Kathy Connor, an executive at Kodak, told Roth the company didn’t develop a better film for rendering different gradations of brown until economic pressure came from a very different source: Kodak’s professional accounts. Two of their biggest clients were chocolate confectioners, who were dissatisfied with the film’s ability to render the difference between chocolates of different darknesses. “Also,” Connor says, “furniture manufacturers were complaining that stains and wood grains in their advertisement photos were not true to life.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jaiq_ZZ_eM
It was the same team that did the famous "Powers of 10" short a few years later. It included a rousing voiceover by Philip Morrison, an MIT prof who worked on the Manhattan Project but later became a major proponent of nuclear nonproliferation.
This video has a special place in my heart. It effortlessly moves from a commercial to an instructional video to an impressively coherent discussion of how it works before ultimately explaining that the camera is a tool intended to further increase the true potential of humankind.
You can laugh all you want, but years later I cannot watch this without tearing up.