Polaroid Autofocus 660
There are some cameras you buy because the very idea of what they do feels almost magical. The Polaroid Autofocus 660 — sold in the United States under the slightly more glamorous name Sun 660, and known internationally simply as the Autofocus 660 — was the camera I saved up pocket money for through most of 1981 and into the summer of 1982, while I was thirteen years old, living in Jebel Ali Village in Dubai, and convinced that being able to take a photograph and watch it develop in your hand in front of you was just about the coolest thing a camera could possibly do. When I finally bought one it was the first instant camera I had ever owned and the first camera I had ever bought myself with my own saved money. I was thoroughly delighted with it.
The Autofocus 660 turns out, in retrospect, to be a genuinely interesting object — slightly more sophisticated than its plastic-fantastic exterior suggests, and historically significant as the first 600-series Polaroid with sonar autofocus and one of the cameras that turned 600 film from a niche flagship product into a mass-market consumer phenomenon. It launched in 1981, at the same time as 600 film itself, was sold continuously through the mid-1980s in several variants, and remains today one of the most plentiful and easily-found vintage Polaroid cameras on the second-hand market (Wikipedia). The fact that it occupied a chunk of my thirteenth summer in Dubai — and consumed a quite enormous fraction of my pocket money before that — is a small personal coincidence that the camera itself, characteristically, has nothing to say about.
A short history of Polaroid
To understand what the Autofocus 660 is, you have to first understand the company that made it. Polaroid Corporation was founded in 1937 by Edwin H. Land — an extraordinary American inventor and scientist who left Harvard in his late teens without finishing his degree, set up a small laboratory in New York to perfect a technique for manufacturing synthetic sheet polarisers, and over the course of his career was granted 535 separate US patents, the second-highest individual total in American history after Thomas Edison (Wikipedia). Land's original business was polarising film for sunglasses, anti-glare automotive headlights, photographic filters and 3D-cinema glasses, and through the 1930s and 1940s the Polaroid Corporation made a perfectly respectable middle-sized business out of these products. The pivot to instant photography came almost by accident.
In 1943, on holiday in Santa Fe with his family, Land took a photograph of his three-year-old daughter Jennifer, who immediately asked him why she couldn't see the picture straightaway. Land went for a long walk to think about the question, and by the time he returned to the hotel he had — by his own account — worked out the entire chemistry, optics and physical engineering of a system that would compress all of the steps of conventional photographic development into a single self-contained film unit, processable in seconds without a darkroom. "Within an hour," he later said, "the camera, the film, and the physical chemistry became so clear" that he went straight back to Cambridge and started filing patents.
The first Polaroid camera — the Model 95 — went on sale at the Jordan Marsh department store in Boston in November 1948 and sold out within minutes. It produced sepia-toned prints, took sixty seconds to develop after the user peeled off a negative-backing sheet by hand, and was the beginning of a thirty-year run during which Polaroid Corporation grew from a small Boston polariser-film manufacturer into one of the most-recognised technology companies in the world. A true (non-sepia) black-and-white film followed in 1950. Polaroid color film arrived in 1963, after a fifteen-year programme of chemistry research that involved synthesising and testing over five thousand experimental dye compounds before the final formulation was settled. The earlier "peel-apart" packs were replaced in 1972 by what would become the single most iconic Polaroid product in the company's history — the SX-70 integral instant film system, in which the negative, positive, developer chemistry, opacifier layers and processing reagent pod were all contained within a single self-developing 8.8 × 10.7 centimetre film unit, ejected automatically by an electric motor when the shutter fired and developing in front of your eyes without any further intervention (Wikipedia).
The SX-70 was, by some margin, the most technically ambitious consumer product ever shipped up to that point. It was a folding single-lens reflex with a glass lens, an electromagnetically-controlled shutter, an electric film-eject motor, a clever folding viewfinder-and-mirror system, and a film cartridge containing ten integral self-developing colour units — each of which was a seventeen-layer sandwich of negative, positive, developer chemistry, timing layers, light-reflecting layers and a chemical opacifier that allowed the picture to be ejected from the camera in full daylight and develop without any further user action. Land called it "absolute one-step photography," and considered it the crowning achievement of his career. He had spent thirty years getting to it.
SX-70, sonar autofocus, and the road to 600
The SX-70 system in its 1972 launch form was sophisticated, beautiful, and slightly difficult. The original SX-70 film was rated at ASA 75, which is slow by any standard — it required either bright daylight or one of Polaroid's disposable Flashbar units to expose properly, and indoor pictures without flash were essentially impossible. The folding-SLR camera was an exquisite piece of engineering, but expensive (it launched at $180 in 1972, which is roughly $1,400 in 2025 money), and the manual focusing system on the original models — a split-image rangefinder in the viewfinder, which Land had reluctantly added at the insistence of his engineers — required a degree of patience that not every consumer had.
Polaroid responded to these limitations in two stages. The first, in 1978, was the Sonar OneStep — an SX-70-format folding SLR with the world's first ultrasonic sonar autofocus system, designed by Polaroid's electronics division and bolted onto the front of the existing SX-70 body in a small gold-coloured circular module (Stollee). The Sonar OneStep was the first autofocus SLR ever sold to consumers — predating the Pentax ME-F (1981), the Canon AL-1 (1982), and the Minolta Maxxum 7000 (1985), each of which is variously credited with "the first autofocus SLR" depending on which definition of SLR you use. Polaroid's claim is solid: the Sonar OneStep was on shop shelves three years before the Pentax, and it focused properly. The principle was simple — the gold disc on the front of the camera was a piezoelectric transducer that emitted a brief inaudible high-frequency ultrasonic pulse, listened for the returning echo from whatever the camera was pointed at, measured the round-trip time, and drove a stepper motor to set the lens to the correct focus distance. Polaroid called it "Sonar OneStep" and advertised it under the slogan "Life doesn't just sit there waiting for you to focus".
The second stage was the 600 film system, launched in 1981. The motivation here was straightforward: SX-70 film at ASA 75 was simply too slow for most consumer photography, and Polaroid had spent the late 1970s working on a faster integral colour film that would let buyers use their Polaroid cameras indoors and in low light without depending on disposable flash. The result was Polaroid 600 film — physically the same 8.8 × 10.7 centimetre integral cartridge as SX-70, electrically and mechanically interchangeable with SX-70 cameras (though with different exposure characteristics), but rated at ASA 640: approximately four times faster than SX-70 film, fast enough for indoor photography with a small built-in flash, and the foundation of what would become Polaroid's biggest commercial success (Wikipedia).
The launch in 1981 included three new 600-series cameras designed specifically to take advantage of the faster film: the basic Sun 600 (fixed-focus, fixed-exposure, with a built-in electronic flash); the Sun 640 (a slightly more capable version with Polaroid's "Light Management System" exposure-compensation slider); and the top-of-the-line Autofocus 660 (sold as the Sun 660 in the US), which incorporated the sonar autofocus system from the earlier Sonar OneStep into a 600-film body. Together with the launch of 600 film itself, this was Polaroid's largest product release since the SX-70 in 1972, and was supported by an advertising campaign that ran on prime-time American television throughout 1981 and 1982 (New York Times).
The Autofocus 660 itself
The Autofocus 660 is the camera that resulted from putting Polaroid's late-1970s sonar autofocus system into a body designed around the new 1981 600-film cartridge. It is a folding plastic camera — though "folding" is a generous word, because unlike the SX-70 it does not collapse flat for storage; instead the front of the camera tilts up from the body for use and folds down against the body for slightly more compact carriage. The body is moulded from a single piece of textured grey-and-black engineering plastic, with a recessed top deck containing the lens housing, the sonar transducer, the viewfinder housing, and the small red shutter-release button. The whole assembly weighs 499 grams without film and measures roughly 19 × 18 × 18 centimetres in operating position (Museo Nazionale della Fotografia).
The lens is a single-element plastic optic with a focal length of 116 millimetres and a fixed maximum aperture of f/11. On the 79 × 79mm image area of a 600-film print, that focal length is equivalent in field-of-view to roughly a 38mm lens on full-frame 35mm — wider than a 50mm normal lens, comfortable for general-purpose snapshot photography and the kind of casual indoor and outdoor work the camera was built for. The aperture is fixed (not variable), which means that exposure is controlled entirely by varying the shutter speed; the electronically-timed shutter runs from 1/4 second to 1/200 second and is controlled by a small light-sensing cell on the front of the camera that reads ambient light at the moment of exposure (Casual Photophile).
The sonar autofocus is, in 2026, still one of the more genuinely clever pieces of consumer electronics ever fitted to a camera. The large gold-coloured disc on the front of the Autofocus 660 (sometimes mistaken by people who don't know what it is for a flash unit) is a piezoelectric ultrasonic transducer. When you half-press the shutter, the transducer emits an inaudible high-frequency burst — somewhere in the 40-50 kilohertz range, comfortably above the human hearing threshold — and then immediately switches into receive mode and listens for the returning echo from whatever the camera is pointed at. The camera's internal logic measures the round-trip time of the echo (sound travels at roughly 343 metres per second in air, so a 4-foot subject distance gives a round-trip time of about 7.1 milliseconds), converts this to a focusing distance, and drives a small stepper motor that rotates the lens cell to the correct focus point. The whole sequence takes a fraction of a second, and is genuinely uncannily accurate at the camera's intended working distances of approximately 4 to 5 feet from the subject.
The sonar system has two failure modes worth knowing about. First, it cannot focus through glass — point an Autofocus 660 at a subject behind a window and the sonar pulse will return from the glass rather than the subject. (This is essentially the same physical principle that makes a sonar fish-finder work; ultrasonic sound bounces off the first reflective surface it encounters, and a sheet of glass is a perfectly good reflector.) Second, at distances closer than about three feet the sonar resolution falls off, and the lens may not focus accurately. Polaroid's solution to the second problem was to specify a minimum working distance of four feet in the user manual, and to fit the lens with a hyperfocal extension so that everything from about four feet to infinity is reasonably sharp at f/11. The combination of these constraints means the Autofocus 660 is best at moderate-distance snapshots of people and scenes — exactly the use case Polaroid had in mind — and is less successful at close-up macro work or table-top product photography.
The controls are pretty simple on the Autofocus 660 — this was, after all, a camera designed as a point-and-shoot for the consumer market. The front view of the camera shows nearly all of the things: the fold-up front unit contains the electronic flash, and conveniently raises it high enough above the lens to avoid most red-eye.
The front panel is dominated by the large brass/gold disc of the AF sonar transducer to the left (when viewed from the front). In the centre, the lens is slightly recessed within a square gold-coloured bezel, and just below it, the darken/lighten slider gives some minimal control over exposure. On the right is the large square viewfinder lens, and below it is the hole for the light meter’s photocell.
Protruding below the front panel are the film door and its film-exit slot, through which the photos emerge once exposed. A film shade can be seen within the slot, which shields the emerging frame from light as it emerges and rolls back in once it is completely ejected. This presumably gives the opacification layer a few more fractions of a second to become established. The latch for the film door is on the side of the camera body, just below the shutter release button. The film door hinges downwards, allowing you to change the film pack.
The back and underside of the camera are far simpler. Viewed from behind, the shutter release is located on the right side of the camera body and is easily reached by the index finger when holding the camera. Behind and to its upper left is the small, square, recessed frame counter. On the left side of the camera body, the viewfinder assembly protrudes back far enough so that you can look through it without your nose getting squashed by the back of the camera. Finally, at the far rear, are the camera strap lugs. The base of the camera sports a central threaded tripod mount.
The 600 film and its chemistry
It is worth saying a little about what the 600 film actually is, because the technical achievement that Polaroid pulled off in compressing a complete colour photographic process into an 8.8 × 10.7 centimetre integral pack is, even today, slightly extraordinary. Each individual 600-film unit is a seventeen-layer sandwich of polymer sheets sealed at the edges and protected by an opaque envelope. The bottom-most layers contain three light-sensitive silver halide negative emulsions, one for each of the primary colour channels (red, green and blue), each one tethered to a "dye developer" molecule — Polaroid's 1960s-era chemical innovation, in which the developer molecule and the corresponding dye molecule are joined as a single chemical species so that they migrate together through the film during processing. The top-most layers are a transparent image-receiving sheet, against which the final positive image forms. Between the two sets of layers is a thin timing layer, an opacifier layer (which prevents light entering through the back of the film unit during the development process), and a reagent pod at one end containing the highly alkaline developer chemistry.
When the shutter fires, light passes through the lens, through the transparent image-receiving sheet and the opacifier and timing layers, and exposes the three silver halide negative emulsions according to the colours in the scene. The camera then ejects the film unit through a pair of precisely-spaced steel rollers at the front of the camera, which physically rupture the reagent pod and spread its contents — a thin layer of alkaline developer chemistry, less than three-thousandths of an inch thick — evenly across the entire image area. The alkaline developer activates the dye developers in the negative layers, which migrate upward through the timing and opacifier layers to the image-receiving sheet, depositing the appropriate cyan, magenta and yellow dyes in the appropriate positions to form the final positive colour image. The opacifier layer, initially opaque to protect the developing film from external light, gradually becomes transparent as the alkaline reagent is consumed, revealing the finished picture. The whole process takes approximately 90 seconds from ejection to a viewable image, with full chemical equilibrium reached over about half an hour (American Chemical Society).
The 600 film also brought a built-in battery to the system for the first time. Each film pack contains a thin 6-volt lithium primary cell (the PolaPulse, custom-manufactured for Polaroid by a series of suppliers over the years) which powers the camera's electronics, the sonar transducer, the flash recycling circuit and the film-eject motor for the lifetime of that pack of film. When you finish a pack of film and load a new one, you get a fresh battery — which is one of the cleverer aspects of the whole system design, because it means a Polaroid 600 camera will never have a flat battery as long as it has unused film in it, and it removes the need for a separate battery compartment on the camera body. Forty-odd years later, this is still the arrangement used by the current Polaroid Originals i-Type and 600 films, which remains in production by the spiritual successor company Polaroid B.V. (the Dutch entity that bought Polaroid's last factory in Enschede in 2008 and has kept integral instant film alive ever since) (Wikipedia).
What it's like to own one now
Working examples of the Autofocus 660 on UK eBay in 2026 typically sell for between £30 and £80, with the higher prices for clean cosmetically-perfect bodies and the lower prices for working-but-scuffed examples that have clearly been used as actual cameras for the past four decades. The camera itself is one of the most reliable Polaroid 600-series cameras ever made — the sonar system is robust, the electronics are conservative and the moulded plastic body is essentially indestructible — and most working units that come up for sale today will continue to work for many more years, assuming they're fed with fresh 600 film and the steel ejection rollers are kept clean (a single dirty roller will reliably leave a streaky line across every print until the dirt is wiped off, which is the single most common cosmetic fault on second-hand Polaroid prints).
The film, remarkably, is still in production. Polaroid B.V., the Dutch company that bought the last Polaroid integral-film factory in Enschede in 2008 and spent the better part of a decade reinventing the chemistry to work without ingredients no longer commercially available, sells modern 600 film in both colour and black-and-white under the simple "Polaroid 600" name. Each pack contains eight exposures (rather than the 1980s standard of ten — Polaroid never recovered the manufacturing scale for the larger packs), retails at about £18 to £20, and produces prints that are recognisably the same medium as the 1982 originals while being slightly more saturated, slightly more colour-accurate, and slightly more contrasty than the originals were. The Autofocus 660 will accept these modern packs without any modification, with the small caveat that the camera's film counter assumes a 10-exposure pack and is therefore always two frames ahead of reality — when the counter reads 10, you have 8 frames; when it reads 3, you have 1 frame; and so on (Shoot It With Film).
What you get for the money, in 2026, is exactly what was on offer in 1982: a slightly absurd, magnificently over-engineered, gloriously single-purpose object that takes one specific kind of photograph extremely well. The square 79mm image with its white border, the slightly soft single-element plastic optics, the deep saturated colours of the 600 film, the gentle film grain, the slight chemical strangeness around the edges where the dye-developer layers haven't quite migrated cleanly to the receiving sheet — none of this is what you would want for any kind of serious photographic work, and yet all of it is precisely what makes a Polaroid print recognisably a Polaroid print and different from any other photograph you might take. The Autofocus 660 is the camera that delivers that print, reliably, with a level of magnificent overkill on the sonar autofocus that no fixed-focus consumer camera ever quite matched.
