Polaroid Colorpack III Camera

The Polaroid Colorpack III is a rigid-bodied camera for type 100 instant film. It is an improved version of the Colorpack II  and introduced a year after it, in 1970. Earlier examples have glass lenses, but most are plastic. As with the other Colorpack cameras, the lens is a three-element one, with front-element scale focusing.

Instead of the Colorpack II’s ‘face-sized’ mark in the vewfinder for focusing at five feet, the III has an ingenious focusing aid, on the left side of the body. This consists of a small pendulum in a casing with a distance scale. There is a button which, when pressed, releases the pendulum, which will then point vertically down.

In the camera’s viewfinder, there is a red horizontal line. To use the distance-finder, the user aims the camera so that the red line falls at the point where the subject meets the ground (say, at feet of a portrait subject); the camera will be angled slightly downward. Holding the camera like this, the user presses the button on the distance finder briefly. The distance can then be read off the scale, and the lens focused to match (it has front-element focus, like the Colorpack II). The accuracy of this system relies on the user being a certain height.