BOSTON (AP) -- Polaroid Corp. is dropping the technology it pioneered long before digital photography rendered instant film obsolete to all but a few nostalgia buffs.Oops.
Polaroid is closing factories in Massachusetts, Mexico and the Netherlands and cutting 450 jobs as the brand synonymous with instant images focuses on ventures such as a portable printer for images from cell phones and Polaroid-branded digital cameras, televisions and DVD players.
This year's closures will leave Polaroid with 150 employees at its Concord headquarters and a site in the nearby Boston suburb of Waltham, down from peak global employment of nearly 21,000 in 1978.
The company stopped making instant cameras over the past two years.
''We're trying to reinvent Polaroid so it lives on for the next 30 to 40 years,'' Tom Beaudoin, Polaroid's president, chief operating officer and chief financial officer, said in a phone interview Friday, after the company's plans were reported in The Boston Globe.
Polaroid failed to embrace the digital technology that has transformed photography, instead sticking to its belief that many photographers who didn't want to wait to get pictures developed would hold onto their old Polaroid cameras.
When I first got into church insurance we used Polaroid cameras for all our photos. It was a pain to carry the bulky camera and the 10 photo film packs around, especially if you had a church or a camp with lots of buildings and needed lots of photos. When we switched to digital cameras it was a godsend.
I actually threw my Polaroid camera away since I was never going to use it again and the film cost about $1 per picture. Pixels aren't that expensive and a bad shot doesn't cost anything.
They should have seen this coming.
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