The Pohlad family from Minnesota has bought a majority stake in Polaroid for $70 million. The instant camera maker, based in Minnetonka, is now branching out and offering a range of other electronic products.The $70 million dollar acquisition includes the assumption of $18 million in debt and other liabilities.Four years ago Polaroid filed for bankruptcy.

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The once mighty Polaroid, the Apple of its day, would be all but unrecognizable now to those who recall its breakthrough instant-photography products and its founder, Edwin Land.A still-iconic brand name to those of a certain generation, Polaroid once employed tens of thousands. It now has but a few dozen staffers in a humdrum Minnetonka office building, its headquarters, and in Boston and New York City.The company has filed for bankruptcy twice and been rescued twice in recent years. The first blow came with the onset of digital photography, the second with the downfall of its would-be benefactor, Twin Cities businessman-turned-convicted fraudster Tom Petters.Long gone are the company’s famed research-and-development facilities and its technical staffers who churned out amazing innovations. But Polaroid still has its brand — and that counts for a lot. The crowds packing the CES booth pleased the company’s longtime fans, such as Mike Evangelist of Birchwood, Minn.“It was nice to see the venerable Minnesota-connected Polaroid brand making a comeback,” said Evangelist, marketing chief at Minneapolis tech firm Code 42 Software.What wasn’t apparent to most CES showgoers: Polaroid isn’t remotely like the company founded by Land, who conceived the groundbreaking Polaroid Land Camera and its successors internally, with vast resources at his command.The company now has no such infrastructure.

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It invented few of the products and services it has recently unveiled with much fanfare.Polaroid is little more than its name — one which it licenses to other tech-product makers or tech-service purveyors around the world.PETTERS’ HANDThis business approach was — though Polaroid might be loathe to acknowledge it now — Tom Petters’ idea.Petters, now serving 50 years in federal prison for fraud, was a Twin Cities business mogul whose Petters Group Worldwide empire included Sun Country Airlines and other legitimate high-profile businesses. It also included a subsidiary that ran a Ponzi scheme that at its end in 2008, totaled some $3.5 billion in fraud. Although Polaroid wasn’t part of the scheme, some of the ill-gotten gains were used to help float Petters’ other businesses.Polaroid became part of Petters’ portfolio in 2005, four years after it first filed for bankruptcy.