I am truly puzzled by a new fad that's sweeping the youth of today. I'm puzzled because it's not new at all. In fact it seems to me to be a retrograde step in the relentless evolution of technology. I'm talking about the Polaroid or Instant Camera. This is one of the originals from the 1960s (in fact Mr Land invented the first 'Instant Camera' in 1948): And here's the one my son just got for Christmas: In 2008, Polaroid went bust (again!). The world had gone digital. Film cameras had all but disappeared. Serious photographers today use digital SLRs made by the likes of Canon and Nikon. The rest of us use our ubiquitous smartphones. And with cloud storage, we are no longer constrained to the thousands of high resolution images our phones and cameras could store locally. Now our personal picture-taking capacity is limitless. Film and cartridge cameras limit you to a handful of pictures before you had to - expensively - load the camera again. An
My kids call me Grom (Grumpy Old Man). OK, pedants will know that ought to be GOM, but a Grom sounds grumpy. I started building internet businesses in the 1980s and these days invest in other peoples' start-ups. Now that less of my life is about to happen than has happened, I've got a lot to get off my chest. This blog is a series of posts about things that annoy me, things that excite me or things that just need to be said. Grumbles of a Grom... Grombles