Growing up, Polaroid was quite the revolutionary company. With all the other digital cameras on the market, you had to take the picture, process the film, and eventually end up with a print an hour later from the photo lab. With the (near) instant gratification offered by Polaroid, you could see your prized picture in a matter of minutes.

With the advent of digital cameras, we can know immediately how a pictured turned out. This took out one of the major appeals of the Polaroid system and, despite a valiant effort to revitalize the brand, Polaroid has filed for bankruptcy. File this one under chapter 11 for the memory-maker of yesteryear.

In addition to the ability to view our digital pictures immediately on our digital cameras, the introduction of affordable home photo printers has started to take away from that business as well. In this way, Polaroid doesn’t have nearly as much to offer in this digital age as it did during the film-based age. It may be fun for young ones to instantly print out sticker pictures with Polaroid, but that’s not enough of a market to sustain the whole company.

Is this to say that Polaroid is dead? Not exactly. While the company is filing a Chapter 11 bankruptcy and discontinuing its line of instant film, CEO Mary L. Jeffries feels that Polaroid can still restructure and re-launch in 2009 with a new product line.