this is great news actually. The chemical footprint that is required by polaroid to manufacture the film for the instamatic was awful.

Ahh yes and anyone remember Fotomat?
Ya always wondered where did the clerks go to the bathroom?

Besides you can always print your digfotos on a printer with photopaper.

They don't use wax cylinders anymore, either.
21st century...Smithsonian exhibit

I wouldn't be at all surprised if Fuji or someone else continued to make the film as a specialty product for those very special Kodak moments.

Manuel

I guess it was inevitable but what a great shame, nevertheless. Large format professional Polaroids had a unique quality and richness that will be lost for ever, just like those superb Cibachrome prints made directly from transparencies. SX70 polaroids had their deserved place in history. I've still got some from 25 years ago and they've lasted well.

As we progress we always seem to lose something precious along the way, but that's the way of the world. I'm just glad I was working as a professional photographer and specialist monochrome printer in what turned out to be the heyday of professional films and printing papers at the end of the 70's and early 80's.

As others have already mentioned, the greatest problem we have in the future of photography is the archival problem. We're now generating billions of digital images every day, and virtually none of them ever exist in the physical world as good quality prints. They stay on our hard-drives and end up being lost, deleted or corrupted. Our cheap-and-cheerful home print-outs will last about ten seconds, and future generations will never have the benefit of emotionally charged family photo albums spanning generations, or museum collections to refer to and which connect us to our past.

I am shocked that they were still making these. I thought they disappeared ten years ago.

These used to be fun.

Never figured out what "SX" in the SX 70 stood for....couldn't possibly have been a not so subliminal appeal to take home porn pix...nah!

James Garner....nice guy. Gave the best performance of his life in "The Notebook" - he should have been nominated for the Academy Award.

Alot of professional photographers relied on taking polaroids.
Wether it was checking on the focus with the negative , or using it as a light meter(Take a picture and look at it).
It will be missed. And I wont even mention the photo transfers.

"Video killed the radio star."

The handwriting was on the wall. We have officially entered the "Digital Age".

Was chatting recently with a law professor here at UNLV. She was telling a group of us about how courts are not accepting digital photos due to the ease of photo shop. With even regular cameras being able to have th photos digitally enhanced and touched up, it is difficult to determine if a photo is genuine or not without extensive testing. The only photos that were truly genuine and pretty much unalterable were the Polaroid instant photos. Their quality may be horrid, but they certainly are more truthful than digital.

Wow, this has been a long time in coming. Polaroid's death march (of the instant camera that is) has been at least a decade in the making.

Polaroids WERE fun. I still have all of mine in a "photograph book!"
Thanks for the photo of James Garner and Mariette Hartley. Garner was so handsome in those polaroid days!

This has been coming for years. Remember when Eastman-Kodak laid off 5,000 people about 10 years ago?