The Polaroid SX-70 is a gorgeous piece of machinery, and this beautiful 10-minute short film about it will make even newcomers to its magic drool. Shot by Charles and Ray Eames, the film takes viewers back to a time when amateurs and hobbyists felt a shutter click under their fingers instead of just hearing a digital sound sample. When the mechanical engineering and design of consumer electronics were complex but still understandable to motivated enthusiasts.

Is it cool enough to pay $30 for a cartridge of discontinued film on eBay when you can take unlimited shots on your camera for free? We'll let you decide.

Polaroid as a company and a brand has been on the ropes for years now, but ultimately refuses to die. We’ve heard there will soon be Polaroid televisions and tablets, and its name is also attached to a new digital camera called the Polaroid Socialmatic, which can share your photos on the internet and print your photos right from the camera like the old days (albeit with new technology).

It’s been a long and crazy road for Polaroid, which produced the Land Camera back in 1948, named after founder Edwin H. Land. Before cameras, Polaroid was in the sunglasses business, but nowadays the name is synonymous with instant photography.

The story goes that Land got the idea for the Land Camera from his young daughter, who wondered why the cameras she saw didn’t make the photos appear right away. The process he invented to make that happen involved exposing a negative, and then transferring that negative over to paper by squishing it between rollers in the camera and injecting a developing reagent.

Between 1948 and 1953, the Land Camera sold 900,000 units, and over the years the company grew into a photography giant. Things started getting bad in the 1980s, and the company was walloped by the rise of digital photography.

During the bad times, however, people’s love for instant film never died, as evidenced by the rise of the Impossible Project, which took over manufacturing instant film for several of the most iconic Polaroid cameras, including the Polaroid 600 and the SX-70. The company, based in the Netherlands, has steadily been growing and now offers the “Instant Lab,” which transfers your iPhone photos to instant film.

We’re curious to see where things go from here. We’ve followed the Polaroid Socialmatic camera from conception and are waiting to see how the idea of a digital/analog mashup is received. We’re all fans of holding photos in our hands and hanging them on our walls and hope the camera and Polaroid as a brand continue to hang on.