Polavision
color home movie system by Polaroid
Polavision was an "instant" color home movie system launched by Polaroid in 1977.
Technology
Unlike other motion picture film stock of the time, Polavision film reproduces color by the additive method, like the much earlier Dufaycolor film. In essence, it consists of a black-and-white emulsion on a film base covered with microscopically narrow red, green and blue filter stripes. It was instant in the sense that it could be very quickly and easily developed in the Polavision processing unit after it was removed from the Polavision camera, ready for viewing in only a few minutes.
The Polavision cartridge called Photo tape cassette is a small rectangular box containing the film reels and a prism letting in light for projection through a film gate. The film format is similar to the super 8 mm format, but without the Polavision tabletop viewer the only way a Polavision film can be shown is by destroying the cartridge and projecting the removed film with an ordinary super 8 mm projector or transferring it to video with a telecine system.
The Polavision system was a major commercial failure, and was discontinued in 1979. However, the underlying technology was improved and used as the basis for the Polachrome instant color transparency system introduced in 1983.
Problems and commercial failure
Due to the light loss caused by the filtering layer, which allows only red, green or blue light to pass through any given point on it, the film had relatively low light sensitivity (40 ASA) and the developed footage has an overall veil that appears to be a neutral gray. The system features a standalone tabletop viewer designed to minimize the problems inherent in projecting such dense film.
“Polavision” enters the record as color home movie system by Polaroid. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Polavision, color and home can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Polavision” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.