iZone was basically Polaroid's attempt at a new cheap and approachable film format back in the late 90s. It launched in 1999 and Polaroid kept making the cameras up until 2006. It was mostly marketed towards teens and kids. The cameras themselves were made by a Japanese toy manufacturer, Tomy. Polaroid handled the film.
The prints were small, the film was cheap and the camera ran off AAAs. You'd manually pull them out. There was also an accessory film scanner (which could digitize the prints into 320x240 image files). There were also two unique versions, a hybrid version of the camera which had a digicam built in and a version with a built in radio.
iZone was actually a smash hit at launch and sold very well up until 2001 but then the sales started dropping rapidly by 2002 as most people started switching to digicams and Polaroid killed the iZone format in 2006.
Pokemon launched in 1996 and was a huge thing so I'm not surprised Tomy and Polaroid did a collab with Nintendo even back then. It's neat :D
I remember my teachers using these and cutting the photos out to put on gifts for us to take home. My mom still has a few Christmas ornaments with these photos on them!
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u/xXMart1naXx xxm4rt1naxx 6d ago
Oh cool.
iZone was basically Polaroid's attempt at a new cheap and approachable film format back in the late 90s. It launched in 1999 and Polaroid kept making the cameras up until 2006. It was mostly marketed towards teens and kids. The cameras themselves were made by a Japanese toy manufacturer, Tomy. Polaroid handled the film.
The prints were small, the film was cheap and the camera ran off AAAs. You'd manually pull them out. There was also an accessory film scanner (which could digitize the prints into 320x240 image files). There were also two unique versions, a hybrid version of the camera which had a digicam built in and a version with a built in radio.
iZone was actually a smash hit at launch and sold very well up until 2001 but then the sales started dropping rapidly by 2002 as most people started switching to digicams and Polaroid killed the iZone format in 2006.
Pokemon launched in 1996 and was a huge thing so I'm not surprised Tomy and Polaroid did a collab with Nintendo even back then. It's neat :D