No. 001 · 30 August 2026
Braun × Polaroid
PL 800, folding instant camera, 1971
A Polaroid Land camera with the chrome and leatherette removed, the controls reduced to one orange button and one yellow hand, both colours taken from the film itself.
Announced September 14, 1971 at a press lunch in Frankfurt, the PL 800 followed eighteen months of letters between Kronberg and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Polaroid wanted a camera for the German market to sit above the Model 360. Braun, keen to show Gillette that its photographic line was more than Nizo cine cameras and flashes, offered its design department. Rams called Richard Fischer back from his own studio to share the brief with Robert Oberheim, and set one condition: nothing on the camera would be there to be looked at.
Polaroid kept the architecture. James M. Conner's drop-bed geometry, the roller gate, the CdS eye and the Automatic 250's 114 mm three-element glass lens all survived intact. Fischer redrew everything the hand touches. The chrome struts became flat black anodised plates, and the leatherette became a Nizo-style satin aluminium deck over black ABS. Focus moved from a lever to a ribbed thumbwheel lifted from the T 3 radio. The lens board was painted Braun off-white, the only white on the camera, so that you can find it in a dark room.
The colour scheme was Polaroid's, not Braun's. Oberheim noticed that pack film already told the user what to do with a white tab and a yellow one. He gave the shutter button and the neon ready lamp the orange-red of the Nizo release, gave the development timer a yellow hand to match the yellow tab, and stopped there. The timer is a clockwork 60-second dial with marks at 15 seconds for Type 107 and 60 for Type 108. It is wound with a quarter turn as the tab is pulled, and it strikes a small chime behind a grid of seven holes. Eleven numbered steps are printed in Akzidenz-Grotesk inside the film door, in German and English. The German never says 'Foto', only 'Bild'.
Reviews were respectful rather than warm. PhotoTechnik und Wirtschaft called it 'the first instant camera that does not apologise for itself'. Der Spiegel thought DM 698 was a lot to pay for restraint. Several dealers took orders under the impression it came from Braun Nürnberg, makers of the Paxette, who had nothing to do with it. Polaroid's Hamburg distributor complained that there was nowhere to put a sticker.
