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50 free Polaroid trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Polaroid trivia quiz covers the company Edwin Land founded in 1937, the instant cameras that made it the Apple of its day, and the film that fans refused to let die. The easy questions are ones most people can answer: the founder, the city where the company began, what the first product actually was, the year the first Land Camera went on sale and the folding camera that spat out a developing print in 1972. The harder end is for photography buffs and business-history readers: the question from Land's three-year-old daughter that started it all, how many patents he held, the spy plane he helped design, the $19.95 camera with a jingle, the home-movie system that sank the company's fortunes, how much Kodak was ordered to pay, the year of the first bankruptcy, the Dutch town where the last film factory stood, the three men who founded the Impossible Project, and the pop star briefly named creative director. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries for the company, its founder and its cameras before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our Cameras, Kodak and Inventions quizzes next.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Who founded the Polaroid Corporation in 1937?
Edwin Land
Land ran the company as CEO for 43 years and was on the cover of Life in 1972 as 'A Genius and His Magic Camera'.
Q 02In which Massachusetts city was Polaroid founded?
Cambridge
Its Streamline Moderne headquarters at 784 Memorial Drive is on the National Register of Historic Places.
Q 03What was Polaroid's initial market before instant cameras?
Polarised sunglasses
Its polarisers also went into 3-D movies and protective goggles for military dogs.
Q 04Which university did Land leave after his freshman year to pursue his polariser research?
Harvard
He later returned to Harvard to continue his research but never took a degree.
Q 05Whose question on a 1943 holiday in Santa Fe inspired the idea of instant photography?
Land's three-year-old daughter
Jennifer Land's question sent her father straight to his patent attorney, who happened to be in town.
Q 06In which year did the first Land Camera go on sale to the public?
1948
Land had given the first public demonstration in February 1947.
Q 07At which Boston department store was the Land Camera Model 95 first sold?
Jordan Marsh
By 1950 about 4,400 dealers across the United States sold Polaroid products.
Q 08What colour were the prints from the original Model 95 Land Camera?
Sepia
True black-and-white instant film followed in 1950 and colour Polacolor in 1963.
Q 09In which year did Polaroid introduce Polacolor, its instant colour film?
1963
Until 1972 users still had to pull a tab and peel the negative from the print.
Q 10Which 1972 camera was the first to eject a self-developing print automatically?
SX-70
It was a folding single-lens reflex, produced until 1981.
Q 11What type of camera design was the SX-70?
A folding single-lens reflex
Land announced it at the company's annual meeting in April 1972.
Q 12Which feature did the 1978 Sonar OneStep bring to consumer SLRs for the first time?
Autofocus
It bounced ultrasound off the subject, so it could focus even in the dark.
Q 13How much did the Polaroid Swinger cost when launched in 1965?
$19.95
A catchy Meet the Swinger jingle helped make it one of the best-selling cameras of all time.
Q 21What was Polaroid's peak number of employees, reached in 1978?
21,000
The Boston Globe called the company the Apple of its time.
Q 22Which term describes the management failure blamed for Polaroid's digital-era collapse?
The success trap
Ironically Polaroid had made an early digital camera, the PDC-2000, in 1996.
Q 23In which year did Polaroid stop making its cameras, before ending film sales after 2009?
2007
Manufacturing had been sold to Flextronics and largely moved to China.
Q 24Which pop star was appointed Polaroid's creative director in January 2010?
Q 14Which kind of film did the Swinger use?
Black and white only
Its wallet-size prints were little more than half the size of the standard 40-series roll.
Q 15Which chemical component do the rollers break open as instant film leaves the camera?
A pod of reagent
Diffusion transfer then moves the dyes from the negative to the positive.
Q 16Which Polaroid home-movie system of 1977 was called the company's swan song?
Polavision
It arrived just as videotape systems took off, and the write-off came to $89 million.
Q 17Roughly how long did a cartridge of the 1977 instant home-movie system run?
Under three minutes
A Betamax or VHS tape ran at least an hour at top quality.
Q 18Which company did Polaroid sue in 1976 for copying its instant photography patents?
Kodak
The federal case lasted ten years.
Q 19How much was Kodak ordered to pay Polaroid at the end of the patent suit?
$909.5 million
Kodak also had to stop making instant cameras altogether.
Q 20In which year did the original Polaroid Corporation first file for bankruptcy?
2001
Its peak revenue had been $3 billion just ten years earlier.
Lady Gaga
A PR spokesperson confirmed in 2014 that the partnership had ended.
Q 25What was the name of the 2008 venture that saved instant film for old Polaroid cameras?
The Impossible Project
It bought Polaroid's remaining production machinery for $3.1 million.
Q 26In which Dutch town did the last Polaroid film factory stand?
Enschede
The plant was rebranded under the Polaroid Originals name in 2017.
Q 27Who were the three founders of the 2008 film-rescue venture?
Florian Kaps, André Bosman and Marwan Saba
Kaps and Bosman met at the closing event of the Enschede factory in June 2008.
Q 28Which Polish investor bought the Polaroid brand in 2017?
Wiaczesław Smołokowski
He was already the largest shareholder in the Impossible Project, persuaded to invest by his son Oskar.
Q 29In which year did Polaroid Originals shorten its name back to simply Polaroid?
2020
The Polaroid Now was the first instant camera in years to carry the plain Polaroid name.
Q 30Which 2021 model was billed as the world's smallest analog instant camera?
Go
The I-2 of 2023 was its first premium model with manual controls.