SX-70 Promo Film

A friend was recently extolling to me the virtues of the Polaroid SX-70, specifically its complex internal optical path.

(did you know they’re called Land cameras because that’s the name of the guy who started the company? I always thought it was some aspirational thing like you take your Land Camera in your Land Rover to go take pictures out on the Sahara, but I digress)

Wanting to understand this better led me to YouTube, where I found this promo film dated 1972.

A portion of this video starting about 4:15 in is just a love letter to complex electro-mechanical mechanisms and the men and women who engineer, manufacture, and use them. I appreciated the animated illustrations of the internals, which would have taken a lot of care and craft to make in the analog era this promotional film was produced in.

As a kicker, when the credits rolled I learned this whole thing was a Charles and Ray Eames production (Which perhaps the YouTube account being "eames70" should have been a clue).