--- title: "Polaroid SX-70: Edwin Land's Folding Miracle" url: https://quietmenace.com/tech/polaroid-sx-70-history/ author: Quiet Menace Editors section: Tech published: 2026-09-13 updated: 2026-09-13 topics: Cameras, Industrial Design, Tech History --- # Polaroid SX-70: Edwin Land's Folding Miracle > In 1972 Polaroid sold a single-lens reflex camera that folded flat and spat out pictures that developed in daylight. Nothing else has matched it since. Edwin Land announced the SX-70 at Polaroid's annual meeting in April 1972. It went on sale in Miami late that year for $180, with film at $6.90 for a pack of ten. Folded, it was a flat slab. Opened, it was a single-lens reflex camera that pushed a finished color print into your hand. ## A Camera That Folds Into Itself Most SLRs are boxes. They need a fixed mirror and a prism sitting above the lens, and that geometry takes up space. The SX-70 solved the problem with folding optics. Pull up the top and the body swings open into a wedge, with three unusually shaped mirrors inside, one of them a Fresnel reflector, angled so you see an upright image through the finder. Close it and the whole optical path collapses flat. The lens was a four-element 116mm f/8 glass design that could focus down to 10.4 inches. The shutter ran from 1/175 of a second to longer than ten seconds, governed by an automatic exposure system Polaroid called the Electric Eye. You focused, pressed the shutter button and let the camera handle the rest. ![Two instant photos of vintage payphones on a wall](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1768230636718-ce53d3adf4da?w=1600&h=1067&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop) *Square instant prints, the format integral film made famous Photo by Nik on Unsplash* Land drove the project, with a long list of engineers behind him. The industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss and his firm did the final styling. The original Model 1 body was glass-filled polysulfone plated with a copper, nickel and chromium alloy, which is why it reads as metal at a glance. Later Model 2 and Model 3 versions used ABS plastic in Ebony or Ivory, and the Model 3 dropped the reflex viewing altogether in favor of a simple finder cut into the hood. ## The Battery in the Box The other genius move was in the film. SX-70 integral film came ten exposures to a pack, with a print area of 79 by 79 millimeters on a 3.5 by 4.25 inch sheet. Each pack also carried a flat 6-volt Polapulse battery that powered the camera's motors, electronics and exposure system. Every time you loaded film, you replaced the power source. A camera with a dead battery was a camera that needed film. Polaroid commissioned Charles and Ray Eames to explain all this. Their 11-minute film [SX-70](https://eamesfoundation.org/work/sx-70-polaroid/), scored by Elmer Bernstein, mixes live action and animation to walk through the camera's invention and uses. It premiered at a stockholders meeting and became a sales tool. If you know the Eames Office mainly through furniture, start with our [Eames Lounge Chair history](https://quietmenace.com/design/eames-lounge-chair-history/) and then watch the film. It is the same sensibility applied to a camera. The SX-70 went national in the fall of 1973, and about 700,000 had sold by the middle of 1974. ## Artists Got There First The serious photographers came early. Walker Evans started using an SX-70 in 1973, at the age of 70, and treated it as a serious tool rather than a novelty. Ansel Adams, Andy Warhol and Helmut Newton all used or praised it. Lucas Samaras went further, pushing and smearing the emulsion while the prints developed for his Photo-Transformations series from 1973 to 1976. The camera even flew in space, carried on the Skylab 3 and Skylab 4 missions to photograph a video display. ![Person holding up a white and black Polaroid One Step instant camera](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1521499672281-c8be7d37d451?w=1600&h=1067&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop) *A Polaroid One Step, a simpler non-folding instant camera Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash* Polaroid kept evolving the design. The Sonar OneStep of 1978 added sonar autofocus, making it the first consumer autofocus SLR. Production of the SX-70 itself ran until 1981. Later SLR 680 and 690 models used 600-type film and added a built-in flash. That is the arc of a lot of great analog hardware. A brilliant mechanism, a decade of production, then a long second life among people who refuse to let it go, the same story we tell about the [Leica M6](https://quietmenace.com/tech/leica-m6-film-revival/). ## The Film That Almost Died The SX-70 survived its own company. Polaroid phased out Time-Zero film in 2005 and 2006, and in February 2008 it announced it would stop making instant film altogether. Every SX-70 in the world was about to become a paperweight. Later that year Florian Kaps, André Bosman and Marwan Saba founded the Impossible Project. In October 2008 it bought Polaroid's remaining production machinery for $3.1 million and leased a building at the old Polaroid plant in Enschede, in the Netherlands. Mass production began in 2010. The company bought the Polaroid brand in 2017, renamed itself Polaroid Originals that September and began selling SX-70 film under the old name. In March 2020 it simply became Polaroid. The instant revival connects to the digital one, too. The same hunger for a physical object and a recognizable look powers the [Fujifilm X100](https://quietmenace.com/tech/fujifilm-x100-history/). Find more in the [tech section](https://quietmenace.com/tech/), the [cameras hub](https://quietmenace.com/topics/cameras/) and our [industrial design coverage](https://quietmenace.com/topics/industrial-design/). The [SX-70's full technical record](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polaroid_SX-70) is worth a read for the optics alone. The first film the Impossible Project released, in 2010, was PX 100 Silver Shade First Flush. Two years earlier, everyone had assumed there would never be another pack. --- Filed under: [Cameras](https://quietmenace.com/topics/cameras/), [Industrial Design](https://quietmenace.com/topics/industrial-design/), [Tech History](https://quietmenace.com/topics/tech-history/) Hero image: Photo by Jen Theodore on Unsplash (Unsplash License)