I saw a kid at the airport the other day, carrying a Fujifilm Instax camera, and I wondered what the hell kind of cruel trick her parents were playing on her. That thing is hideous.
But if she’d been carrying the new retro-style Instax Mini 90, I’d have been all “WTF?”
The new Instax is clearly inspired by Fujifilm’s own X-Series cameras. The Instax range — until now available as a series of amorphous plastic blobs — is the only real successor to the Polaroid. It’s an instant camera which takes real film and develops it right there in camera, unlike Polaroid’s recent offerings, which are just crappy printers and even crappier cameras joined into one box.
The new Instax comes with a flash, a rechargeable li-ion battery, macro and bulb mode (bulb usually keeps the shutter open for as long as the button is pressed – or until the battery goes dead, but in this case is up to ten seconds), and double exposure. Clearly if any camera should have neat photo-gimmick features, it’s this one.
Shutter speeds run up to 1/400/sec, and the controls use lots of well-placed knobs and dials.
The Instax is set to launch in Japan in September, and in the U.S next spring. Hopefully that poor girl’s parents will buy her one before next year’s summer holidays.
Source: Fujifilm
