US Edition Polaroid cameras and Polaroid film should both go one sale by the middle of 2010, less than two years after the company collapsed for the second, and what appeared, final time.
The instant cameras will be made in China by Summit Global, the company which bought the license to the Polaroid name after the company collapsed.
The film, meanwhile, will be created by The Impossible Project – the company rescued from the ashes of the Polaroid manufacturing plant based in Enschede, The Netherlands. Over the last year former managers of the factory have worked, as mostly a labour of love, to recreate the magic of the film on a low budget.
Summit Global announced the new Polaroid camera in Hong Kong on Tuesday morning.
Not only will it bring back an analogue version of the original Polaroid One, the most popular model of the instant camera, it will also manufacture a digital version.
Although most famous for the instant camera, Polaroid began life producing polarised sunglasses and goggles for US servicemen during the Second World War.
The famous Polaroid camera was first conceived by Edwin Land in 1947 and thanks to its iconic SX 70 version, which first went on sale in 1972, the company had sold 13 million cameras by 2000.
It won over a whole generation to the fun of photography because of its simplicity. Instead of having to wait for your film to be developed at a local pharmacy or camera shop, users could see their photographs within a minute of taking the picture.
However, the rise of digital photography, combined with internal problems at the company, meant that Polaroid slowly declined before collapsing into Chapter 11 in 2001 and then again in 2008.
A joint venture between Gordon Brother Brands and Hilco – a company that specialises in rescuing and cutting costs at collapsed companies – now owns Polaroid and has licensed the use of the name to different camera and film manufacturers.