The Polaroid SX-70 shipped before its own patent was granted

By Matthew Partsch - Owl and Twig Vintage - October 1, 2026

Polaroid's SX-70 went on sale in 1972 on a patent application that had not yet been approved, under a trademark the company had already held for thirty-six years. The camera most people credit to Charles and Ray Eames was designed by neither of them.

The patent that was still pending when it went on sale

US Patent 3,714,879, titled "Reflex Camera," names three inventors: Edwin H. Land, Polaroid's founder, along with Igor Blinow and Vaito K. Eloranta. Assigned to Polaroid Corporation, it was filed on April 16, 1971, and describes "a fully automatic single-lens reflex camera configured to be foldable into a thin, compact shape suited for convenient carrying in the pocket of a garment." The mechanism packs a motor, a film-processing station, and a dual-circuit gear train around the edges of a rectangular film cassette, using two branches of the gear train at different reduction ratios so the camera can process an exposed print and reposition its internal mirror system at the same time, triggered by selective energizing of the motor in either direction.

Polaroid announced the SX-70 in April 1972, a year after the application was filed, and began selling it in Miami late that same year, with national distribution following in the fall of 1973. The patent itself was not granted until February 6, 1973 — nearly a year after the camera first reached customers. Everyone who bought an SX-70 in its first months owned a camera built on a patent application, not yet an issued patent.

A trademark thirteen years older than the first camera

Polaroid did not coin its own name for a camera. The mark's earliest federal registration, No. 337,404, was adopted and used by the Sheet Polarizer Company, Polaroid's corporate predecessor, beginning on or about November 19, 1935, and registered on August 4, 1936, in the measuring-and-scientific-appliances class — polarizing filter sheet, not photographic equipment. The Sheet Polarizer Company assigned the mark, along with its goodwill, to the newly formed Polaroid Corporation on October 11, 1938. Edwin Land did not publicly demonstrate instant photography until February 1947, and Polaroid did not sell its first camera until November 1948. The trademark predates the demonstration by twelve years and the first camera by thirteen.

Who actually designed the SX-70

Charles and Ray Eames made "SX-70," the nine-minute promotional film Polaroid released alongside the camera in 1972. Many people assume the Eameses designed the object the film documents, since the film itself is so well known on its own. They did not. Industrial design is credited to Henry Dreyfuss Associates, specifically designer James M. Connor, who worked alongside Land on the camera's final shape, its folding action, the way it sat in the hand, and its leather-and-chrome finish. It was the last product Henry Dreyfuss himself worked on before his death.

The folding concept did not originate with Land. Polaroid engineer Alfred Bellows is generally credited with conceiving it, pushing the idea together with colleague Dick Wareham for years while Land resisted — according to an account from Bellows himself, Land only came around to the folding design while thinking it over on a California vacation. Model-shop engineer Len Dionne built the early working prototypes. Patent filings for the folding design trace back to 1967, within a development effort Polaroid had been running since the mid-1960s, which puts the SX-70's real gestation at more than five years before its 1972 launch — a collaboration between several named engineers and an outside design firm, not a single inventor's overnight idea.

The lawsuit that forced Kodak out of instant film

Eastman Kodak announced its own line of instant cameras in 1976, after years of watching Polaroid's instant-photography patents from the sidelines. Polaroid sued for infringement immediately, opening a federal case that ran for a decade. Instant camera sales kept climbing through the litigation — from 7.4 million units in 1976 to 14.3 million by 1978 — with both companies selling into a market neither would fully keep. A federal court found Kodak's cameras infringing in 1985 and ordered the company out of the instant photography business entirely; Kodak's appeal failed, and the company stopped making instant cameras in 1986, leaving an estimated 16.5 million owners of Kodak instant cameras without a continuing source of film. Kodak offered refunds to affected customers, an effort the historical record describes as hampered by further legal complications rather than a clean resolution.

The damages phase took another four years. On October 12, 1990, U.S. District Judge A. David Mazzone ordered Kodak to pay Polaroid $909.5 million — $454.2 million in compensatory damages plus $455.3 million in accrued interest — against the $12 billion Polaroid had originally sought. It remains one of the largest patent-infringement judgments in American history, and it grew directly out of the reflex-camera patent family this guide opens with.

How to date a vintage SX-70 by its body

The SX-70 went through five identifiable production generations between 1972 and the early 1980s, distinguished by body material, viewfinder type, and focusing features rather than by any date stamp on the camera itself.

Early bodies also lack any focus-distance markings printed around the lens barrel, a detail later generations added. None of these features are printed as a code or date — they are physical construction choices that only changed when Polaroid revised the design, so dating a given SX-70 means matching its materials against this table rather than looking for a stamp.

The look-alikes: OneStep, 600-series, and a 2025 homage

The SX-70 is the folding single-lens-reflex body described above. It is not the same thing as a Polaroid OneStep, even though the earliest OneStep cameras used the identical SX-70 film and share part of the name. The original OneStep was a simplified, non-folding, fixed-focus camera built around SX-70 film; later OneStep models switched over to the faster 600 film instead, so the name alone does not indicate which film a given OneStep takes — only the specific model does. Polaroid's 600-series cameras are a separate, distinctly plainer product line again: point-and-shoot plastic bodies with a built-in electronic flash and the camera's battery supplied fresh in every film pack, designed for convenience rather than the SX-70's manual-focus SLR control.

A camera announced in 2025, the Pocket Fold 66 from the Chinese manufacturer 10Art.cc, borrows the SX-70's folding silhouette outright and says so — the maker describes it as "not a copy" but "a rebuild" that pays homage to Land's design. It is not a Polaroid product and carries no Polaroid license. It shoots Fujifilm's Instax square format, not Polaroid-compatible film at all, and its body is aviation-grade aluminum rather than the original's leather-wrapped polysulfone. A genuine vintage SX-70 and the Pocket Fold 66 are unlikely to be confused in hand, but a hazy listing photo online is a different matter — the folding shape alone is not proof of what a camera actually is or what film it takes.

Looking for a working SX-70, a specific production generation, or SX-70-format film to go with one you already have?

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What a vintage SX-70 sells for now

The one named-auction-house realized price this guide could confirm belongs to a camera with celebrity provenance attached, not an ordinary example — Andy Warhol used the camera himself in the 1970s, gave it to his friend and Interview magazine co-founder John Wilcock, and a 2009 letter from Wilcock plus a second authentication from a historical-artifacts dealer accompanied the lot. That price says more about Warhol's name than about a typical SX-70's value. The asking prices above come from a specialist camera-restoration shop selling bodies that have been serviced and tested, which sets them well above what an untested, as-is SX-70 found at an estate sale is likely to bring; this guide found no confirmed aggregate figure for unrestored examples sold as-is, so expect a wide range driven mostly by whether the light seals, foam, and battery contacts have already been dealt with.

For another guide covering a patent's litigation history rather than a dating puzzle, see Owl and Twig's guide to the Magnavox Odyssey's patent and its decades of lawsuits. For another compact electronic design that reshaped its whole category, see the guide to the original Sony Walkman. See more Field Guides