The Polaroid One Step Rainbow. This camera is cheap AND iconic at the same time! A rare combination.

This may not be the greatest picture taking camera in the world, with its plastic lens and plastic build, but the iconic Polaroid One Step SX-70 Rainbow is one of the Polaroids to have if you collect cameras.

And they are quite cheap on eBay. Never pay more than $40 for one of these. As a Camera Legend though, that it is! I think this is the model that inspired the Instagram logo. I mean look at that Instagram logo…The Polaroid One Step Rainbow IS Instagram!

The Instagram icon.

With its fixed focus lens, and virtually no ability to manually control this camera, save for the lighten/darken switch, this camera is perfect for those “ugly” photos I wrote about here. You know, those washed out, faded, blurry photos that people find “artistic” 🙂

Note: The only thing this camera has in common with the original SX-70 I featured before is that it takes SX-70 film, which is much less common that the 600 series film. Other than that, the cameras are night and day in quality.

The original SX-70. The differences in quality between the One Step and the original SX-70 are night and day. The one thing they share in common is that they both take SX-70 film, which today means film from the Impossible Project.