What’s in a name, anyways? A lot if the name is Polaroid. Yes, that old name – the name that conjures up all sorts of nostalgic feelings for those of us that can remember going into a drugstore to buy a ten-dollar cartridge of film. It’s a name that has become synonymous with the great death of analog. But now it’s back – on a new camera called the Socialmatic, which is the world’s first instant Instagram analog camera.
Not involved in any partnership with Facebook or Instagram – the Socialmatic started as a joke on the Internet by ADR Studio and Shishakin Consulting, but people started to take it seriously. Soon they realized they had a potential million-dollar idea on their hands. So ADR Studio bought the license to use the Polaroid name from C&A Licensing and the Socialmatic was born. Note: Polaroid does not exist as a company per se, but only as a name.
What is the Socialmatic? Socialmatic is a life size camera bearing the same visual identification of Instagram, who borrowed their visual identification from Polaroid. Technological cannibalism aside, the Socialmatic lets people take a picture, choose a filter and either print it out or share their photo with the built-in WiFi capability on an Android network.
From Internet joke, to “hey this might make us rich,” to recently announced plans to produce the Socialmatic by early 2014, the excitement is evidently palpable. Although, the whole thing seems vastly too confusing to me, the specs seem promising: 16 gigs of storage, 4:3 touchscreen, optical zoom and flash. And with Socialmatic’s deal with Polaroid, it will get to release camera bags, filters and other camera accessories. Unfortunately, you can cannot currently buy or preorder the Socialmatic, but you can pine for it.
