Polaroid OneStep+2018

History

Polaroid Corporation's original consumer products division folded in 2008 after a protracted series of bankruptcies. The Impossible Project, founded in 2008 by Florian Kaps and others, purchased Polaroid's last film-manufacturing plant in Enschede, Netherlands, and began producing new integral film under the Impossible brand. By 2017, The Impossible Project had acquired the Polaroid brand itself and renamed the enterprise Polaroid Originals (later shortened back to Polaroid).

The OneStep+ launched in 2018 as part of a deliberate heritage strategy: the body form-factor cited the 1977 Polaroid OneStep - the camera that first made instant photography genuinely mass-market - while the electronics and connectivity were fully contemporary. The original 1977 OneStep was a stripped-down, fixed-focus shell with a built-in flash rail, priced to move the newly introduced OneStep film. The 2018 revival compressed that lineage into a single SKU, adding Bluetooth as the product differentiator.

The OneStep+ was succeeded in the consumer lineup by the Polaroid Now (2020), which added an autofocus lens. The OneStep+ continued to sell alongside it, marketed toward users who prioritised creative control through the app over optical precision.

Why It Matters

The OneStep+ marks the point at which Polaroid Originals committed to treating instant film as a creative medium rather than a nostalgia product. The Bluetooth app integration was imperfect at launch - early firmware had connectivity reliability issues - but the feature set it enabled (remote shutter, double exposure, experimental modes) was without precedent in mainstream instant cameras. The camera represents an attempt to make instant photography legible to an audience that had grown up with smartphone cameras.

Culturally, the revival of the OneStep silhouette was a calculated brand move. The 1977 OneStep had appeared in enough period advertising and editorial imagery that its rectangular profile read as "Polaroid" even to consumers who had never owned one. The OneStep+ exploited that recognition while updating the proposition for a market in which film photography was a deliberate aesthetic choice.

Sample Photographers / Notable Use

• No specific fine-art attribution verified for the OneStep+.
• The camera appeared extensively in social-media-driven instant photography communities on Instagram from 2018 onward, particularly in accounts documenting urban street portraiture with i-Type film.
• Polaroid Originals used the OneStep+ as the primary device in its re-launch marketing campaign, shot primarily with the camera's own film to demonstrate emulsion quality improvements over the early Impossible Project stock.

References

• Polaroid: OneStep+ product page - current specifications and supported film types.
• Camera-Wiki: Polaroid OneStep+ - technical notes and variant identification.
• Wikipedia: Polaroid 600 series - 600-format lineage and historical context.
• The Polaroid Project (MIT Press, 2017) - background on Polaroid's original consumer-camera strategy and the cultural legacy the OneStep+ was designed to invoke.