Polaroid stakes claim on budget digicam market | |||||
By Ian Burley | |||||
While Polaroid in the USA is struggling to reinvent itself and fend off financial oblivion, the brand retains plenty of value. All the new cameras, which range from a £49 low resolution model through to a £229 3 megapixel model with 3x zoom lens, are actually designed and made by the Hong Kong-based company, World Wide Licenses (WWL). Another WWL digital camera brand that may sound familiar is Cool-iCam.
WWL has already manufactured 1.5 million digital cameras since it entered the market in June 2000, though most of these have been at the Web Cam low resolution end of the market. One of its success stories has been a toy digital camera licensed under the lucrative ‘Hello Kitty’ character in East Asia. Using the high level of Polaroid brand familiarity among consumers, WWL has set itself a world-wide market share target, presumably measured in unit sales rather than value, of 5% within 2 years. InfoTrends market projections suggest almost 30 million sub-$1,000 digital cameras will be sold world wide during 2003, rising to 50 million by 2007. To date, WWL has specialised in inexpensive consumer electronics products largely marketed through the leisure and toy markets. The new Polaroid branded models will be sold through general purpose high street outlets as well as the specialist photographic trade. To start with, Polaroid models will be fairly conventional, but in the pipeline is a low resolution ‘TV’ camera, which comes with a floppy disk (yes, I did say floppy disk!) docking station that connects to your TV. An affordable DVD-writer, with camera link functionality is also expected in late summer.
In many ways, the new Polaroid cameras can be described as cheap and cheerful. For under £129, the Polaroid PDC 2150 offers 2 megapixel shooting, though it doesn’t feature autofocus or an optical zoom lens. It does have a built in flash, 8MB of internal memory, a 1.5 inch colour LCD viewscreen, a 2x digital zoom, a USB PC interface and a SD card slot for additional memory. It’s also Epson Print Image Matching (PIM) compatible. Supplied software for managing and editing photos comes from ArcSoft, who also supply software to the likes of Canon and other camera makers. All along we at dp-now.com have been expecting a sub-£100 2MP digital camera to act as an important catalyst in bringing ‘proper’ digital snapping to the mass market. By ‘proper’ we mean snaps that can be printed to 6x4 or 5x7 and be truly comparable to conventional film camera snaps of the same sizes. The PDC 2150 gets very close to that milestone.
For £100 more, the PDC 3350 has all the expected basic specifications, including 3MP sensor, a 3x zoom lens and autofocus, plus movie clip mode and a larger 16MB of built in memory. A slightly cheaper 2MP version, the PDC 2350, is also listed.
Away from the Polaroid brand, WWL is also introducing some interesting new models under the Cool-iCam label. These include the bright yellow-finished 2.1MP waterproof Aqua Pack, which will sell for around £199 and the Movi, a hybrid still and video digicam available in 1MP (£99) and 2MP (£129) versions.
WWL is promising extensive and enterprising customer support via its Web site. We’re told that support staff will be accessible online via interactive chat facilities. Last year there were genuine concerns that Polaroid was a doomed brand, defeated by the digital age. But now the brand at least lives on, its survival, perversely, ensured by the digital medium.
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Polaroid, the beleaguered instant pix company, is back and with a certain degree of vengeance. New low cost digicams bearing the Polaroid brand name have been launched this week in the UK.
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DPN News service
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