Polaroid PDC-3000 (1997)

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The Polaroid PDC-3000 was announced March 1997. A follow-up to the PDC-2000. Consumers were complaining about the picture transfer times and the lack of external memory. Therefore Polaroid re-worked their PDC-2000 and gave it a compact flash slot among other improvements. But they were too late. From 1997 there was an enormous demand for cheap digital cameras. Regular consumers weren't willing to spend up to a few thousand dollars for a digital camera. So both cameras did not sell very well. Polaroid responded immediately and ceased all their efforts in producing digital cameras. The digital camera production was outsourced and the PDC-300 was the first digital camera they licensed in 1997.

So what are the differences to it's predecessor? Basically there were two major demands from buyers. They wanted an external memory slot and more control over their camera. Polaroid responded and in the first step offered a Studio Kit for PDC-2000 owners that contained strobes and software to have more control over their cameras. In the second step Polaroid got rid of the expensive internal memory of the PDC-2000 and give it a compact flash card slot. Polaroid also introduced their Image Quality Architecture (IQA) and Polaroid Digital Negative (PDN) features.

Other improvements were a more accurate viewfinder, the possibility to turn off auto-focus and state of the art bundled software that literally had only one purpose: make the best out of your digital camera and it's pictures. Polaroid's IQA was the culmination of thousands of image quality test resulting in an architecture that was implemented in the PDC-3000. Another unique feature was the above mentioned PDN. PDN files are designed to capture all of the original information obtained from the CCD sensor and store it in a compact form for later interpretation. Using the 2:1 lossless compression format, PDN files can encode all of the original sensor information from the PDC-3000's CCD in only 500KB of space.