Polaroid Polavision

1977-1979

Polaroid was founded and led by visionary genius Edwin Land, and the company’s innovative instant photography was hugely successful. However, the Polavision instant video camera system was a huge disaster. 

Despite decades of research and development, the Polavision could only record 2½-minutes of murky, dark video, and a special viewing device was needed to view the video. To top things off, it was also incapable of recording sound.

Polavision flopped because it was too late. Had it been launched in the 1960’s it might have been more successful, but Polavision could not compete with the new superior videocassette-based systems. This catastrophic failure led to the legendary inventor being kicked out of the company he started.

We thank Scott Alexander for this great donation!

Additional info:
Wikipedia
Digital.hbs.edu – Polaroid was too fixated on their existing revenue streams to pivot to the wave of the future. 
Nytimes.com – Polaroid Writes Off $68 Million