Polaroid Trivia
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48 free Polaroid trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Sep 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 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which OutKast hit told listeners to "shake it like a Polaroid picture"?
Hey Ya!
Hey Ya! made the line a catchphrase, and Polaroid had to post a notice that modern prints dry behind a plastic window and need no shaking at all.
Q 02In which Massachusetts city did Polaroid keep its headquarters for most of the twentieth century?
Cambridge
Cambridge is where Land rented his first lab, a garage, in 1932, and the company that grew out of it kept its headquarters in the city into the 1990s.
Q 03Which product was an early money-maker for Polaroid in the 1930s, long before it made cameras?
Sunglasses
Sunglasses with Land's glare-cutting lenses went on sale in the mid-1930s, and the money they brought in helped pay for the research that followed.
Q 04Which university did Edwin Land drop out of to pursue his research on polarised light?
Harvard
Harvard lost him twice, the second time in 1932 without a degree, yet it later gave its dropout an honorary degree.
Q 05Whose question during a holiday in Santa Fe gave Edwin Land the idea for instant photography?
Land's three-year-old daughter
Land's three-year-old daughter asked why she couldn't see the picture he had just taken of her, and he later said that within the hour he had worked out the camera, the film and the chemistry.
Q 06Which American photographer did Polaroid hire as a consultant in the late 1940s?
Ansel Adams
Ansel Adams, a close friend of Land, went on advising the company for decades and wrote a how-to book, Polaroid Land Photography.
Q 07In which city did the first Land Camera go on sale in 1948, at the Jordan Marsh department store?
Boston
Boston shoppers got it first, on the Friday after Thanksgiving, and every camera brought to the store was sold that same day.
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 Christopher Nolan thriller does a man who cannot form new memories hunt a killer using annotated Polaroid photos?
Memento
Memento opens on a Polaroid of a dead man that fades back to blank, because the scene is running in reverse, a first hint that the story will be told backwards.
Q 10What type of camera was Polaroid's SX-70 of 1972?
A folding single-lens reflex
A folding single-lens reflex, it collapsed into a leather-covered slab about an inch thick, slim enough for Land to pull one from his coat pocket at the 1972 unveiling.
Q 11Which feature did the 1978 Sonar OneStep bring to consumer SLRs for the first time?
Autofocus
Autofocus here worked by sound, not light: the camera timed an ultrasonic echo off the subject, so it could focus even in a dark room.
Q 12Which group of buyers was Polaroid's cheap 1965 Swinger camera pitched at?
Teenagers
Teenagers were the target, so the price was held under twenty dollars, which made the Swinger the first truly cheap instant camera.
Q 13Which kind of film did the low-priced Swinger camera of 1965 take?
Black and white only
Black and white only, even though Polaroid's colour film had been on sale for two years: the Swinger was built down to a price.
Q 21Which 1990s pop group put its name to a Polaroid instant camera of its own?
Spice Girls
Spice Girls fans could buy the Spice Cam in the late 1990s, one of a run of celebrity tie-ins that did nothing to stop Polaroid's slide.
Q 22Polaroid's owner was arrested in 2008 for running which kind of fraud?
A Ponzi scheme
A Ponzi scheme worth billions earned Tom Petters a fifty-year sentence, and Polaroid, which he had bought for its famous name, was sold off once more.
Q 23Which pop star was appointed Polaroid's creative director in January 2010?
Lady Gaga
Lady Gaga showed the results a year later at a Las Vegas electronics show: a line of gadgets she had co-designed, including a mobile printer for phone photos.
Q 14Which chemical component do the rollers break open as instant film leaves the camera?
A pod of reagent
A pod of reagent holds only a few drops, and the rollers spread them in a thin layer between the negative and the picture as the print slides out.
Q 15Which instant home-movie system did Polaroid launch in 1977, only to write it off two years later?
Polavision
Polavision films were silent, ran under three minutes and needed their own tabletop viewer, and buyers stayed away.
Q 16Which rival technology, with sound and far longer running times, sank Polaroid's instant home movies of 1977?
Videotape
Videotape recorders gave sound and an hour or more per cassette, while each of Polaroid's silent film cartridges was over in under three minutes.
Q 17Which company did Polaroid sue in 1976 for copying its instant photography patents?
Kodak
Kodak had announced its own instant cameras only days before, and when it finally lost it had to scrap them and offer cash or coupons to people who had bought one.
Q 18Which revered British stage actor fronted the 1972 television adverts for Polaroid's SX-70 camera?
Laurence Olivier
Laurence Olivier took the job on one condition, written into his contract: the adverts must never be shown in Britain.
Q 19What did Polaroid do in October 2001?
File for bankruptcy
File for bankruptcy is what it did, and within a year the Polaroid name and most of the business had been sold to new owners.
Q 20Which later tech giant is Edwin Land's Polaroid often likened to?
Apple
Apple is the usual comparison: Steve Jobs borrowed Land's line about working where science meets art, and called Polaroid's ousting of Land one of the dumbest things he had ever heard of.
Q 24What was the name of the 2008 venture that saved instant film for old Polaroid cameras?
The Impossible Project
The Impossible Project paid $3.1 million for the closing factory's equipment in 2008 and had its first new film on sale in 2010.
Q 25The last Polaroid film factory stood in Enschede, a town in which country?
Netherlands
The Netherlands is right: when the Enschede plant closed in 2008, a group that included former employees took it over and put its production line back to work.
Q 26Which Taylor Swift album has a Polaroid of the singer as its cover?
1989
1989 shows Swift in a Polaroid frame with her face cut off at the eyes, and each CD came with thirteen more prints from a set of sixty-five, each with a handwritten lyric line.
Q 27Which photo app launched in 2010 with square pictures and filters that copied the faded look of old Polaroids?
Instagram gave phone snaps the washed-out tones of old instant prints, and at first every picture had to be square.
Q 28What was the revived film company called from 2017 until 2020?
Polaroid Originals
Polaroid Originals lasted under three years: in March 2020 the company dropped the second word and launched its next camera under the old name alone.
Q 29Which 2021 model was billed as the world's smallest analog instant camera?
Go
Go needed a new film of its own, a miniature version of the classic square print, which went on sale with the camera in April 2021.
Q 30Whose patent tally is Land's most often measured against?
Thomas Edison
Thomas Edison finished with more than a thousand American patents, about double the total Land amassed without ever finishing a degree.