Technology: Featherweight Contender

Ever since the first Polaroid camera came out 16 years ago, Dr. Edwin Land, 54, the scholarly and reticent president of Polaroid Corp., has wanted to make it smaller and handier. Last week the Cambridge, Mass., company announced that it had found a way. It introduced a new camera that is lightweight (2½ lbs. v. 5 lbs. for other Polaroids) and not too much larger than the little 35-mm. camera that festoons tourists the world over. Any other company president might have wanted to do some personal boasting about such an achievement, but not publicity-shunning Edwin Land. He went off to Venice for a rest. Said he: “I’m in no mood to talk about those things now.”

The Polaroid people are convinced that only a truly skilled bungler will be able to ruin a picture with the new Automatic 100 Land Camera. It has a battery-powered shutter that measures the intensity of the light and sets the shutter speed (as high as 1/1200 sec.) at the instant the picture is snapped. The film — either color or black and white — comes in a flat pack that slides into the camera with no threading necessary; and the 31-in. by 41-in. pictures are developed and printed by means of a chemical process built into the film. And it all happens within seconds after the picture is pulled out of the camera, so that there is no waiting to take the next shot. Price: from $119.95 at discount houses to $139.95 at most conventional retail stores. An eight-picture color film pack will cost from $4.88 to $5.95, black and white $1.89 to $2.39.

The Automatic 100 will be on sale late this month; to ensure its success, Dr. Land plans to hit the Christmas market with a $5,000,000 advertising campaign — the most he has ever put behind a camera. He is so confident that the public will grab it up that production of all but one other Polaroid model has been halted.

Riding the crest of a big customer demand for its color film introduced last winter, Polaroid has already racked up the best second-quarter profits in its 26-year history ($2,495,000, up from $734,000 in the same period last year), and the Automatic 100 should send them even higher. In line with Land’s longstanding policy (“Let’s only make what somebody else can’t make”), Pola roid farms out the production of its camera to U.S. Time Corp. (Timex watch es), keeps only the top-secret film-making process to itself. By 1965, however, its patent protection will begin to run out, and the door will be opened to imitators from all over the world. Land intends to make it hard for them to catch up. The Automatic 100 even has two exposure settings on it for films that have yet to appear on the market.