The Polaroid One600
How much complexity can a $30 camera still have and still make a viable business case? Answer: It’s the old razor-and-razor-blade trick…
We’ve probably all had a Polaroid camera at one point in our lives. They’re fun. And (arguably) completely irrelevant in today’s world or digital photography. Still… they still make them.
This was a fun first deconstruction. A deceptively complex product, there’s a heck of a lot crammed into these things. From a nifty shutter mechanism, a collapsing optical path, and an indexing automated film advance, we learned a thing or two.
After some fiddling we managed to get the lid off of this camera with out breaking it. This allowed us to see 1.) a surprising number of loose, discrete wires, 2.) one hell of a capacitor, 3.) a cool molded boot to contain the optical path, and 4.) no obvious power source. More on that later.
Note the copper contacts – that is the feature that interfaces to the power source… The most interesting gearhead aspect in this detail shot is the drive train. A cheap motor drives a pretty elaborate film indexing and advance mechanism. A nip roller, reciprocating indexer, and timing cam all move in synchronization every time a photo is taken. A feature just out of view is the counter reset switch. Every time you open the “film” door, this switch seems to reset a counter in the controller.
The reverse view shows the extent of the drive train, including the gear with a timing cam on the face of the gear. This cam interfaces to a reciprocating linkage that grabs the top-most film sheet and pulls it far enough out of the cartridge to be captured by the nip roller.
We were also pretty impressed with the complexity of the cartridge. The shot below shows the guts with all of the film sheets removed. The sheet metal flexure provides upward bias to the film with a very consistent force.
The most surprising aspect of the cartridge? It is the power source for the camera. Every film cartridge contains a small 5V battery. This battery completes the circuit left open by the twin copper spring fingers shown above.
