Back in Autumn I wrote about The Impossible Project Urban Outfitter's attempts to bring back the Polaroid in when they were gathering support for the discontinued device through selling books and displaying the history of Polaroids in-store.
I might have been skeptical, but they also took over the old Polaroid factory in Enschede, Holland, and all efforts to bring out a new Polaroid, presumably pretty identical to it's demised predecessor.
Luckily it's sexier and will be on display at the Consumer Electrics Show, a major tech show held in Las Vegas (really, how does anyone make it to the show given the massive distractions?). Whilst a couple of critics are suggesting the CES is redundant until the Apple Tablet comes out, whenever that is.
After twelve months spent working on new film for the old-school cameras the new PIC 1000 will be released this year.
Crucially it works with re-engineered Polaroid film cartridges dubbed "Polaroid 1000 instant film", and comes in gorgeous wood-effect and metallic plastic - the latter the same as you'd have had ten years ago. Cameras will be able to shoot as close as 0.6metres/2ft, and have a flash and red-eye reduction built in. They also have a self timer, which is a nice feature. This is all great, although we don't know the price - and after a year's work solely on this project I hope it's not too horrifically high.
They have some great photos over at electricpig.co.uk. For anyone that has a thing for the olympus E-P1 DSLR, this "retro futurism" camera might be the Polaroid for you. I for one, fancy it to bits.