the fuji instax mini evo is a great shitty camera

I’m the first to admit that I have a serious camera problem. I wouldn’t say that I have too many of them, but I would say that the number that I have is a number that you might think was excessive. I’m not gonna list them all here, but there’s a lot of cameras at Chateau Bin Chicken.

The stable of cameras ranges from comically simple (Lomo Colorsplash) through to the needlessly complex (hello Sony RX10 mkIV) by way of the whacky (Insta360 One-R) and the sane (EOS 70D), but the thing is that I love all of them. Well, all of them except for the Canon EOS M, which is a piece of absolutely sun-ripened garbage that never met a scene the autofocus wouldn’t spend a minute hunting through on its way to a truly disappointing result. Absolutely horrible thing that put me off interchangeable lens mirrorless cameras for life.

Until today, the missing piece was an instant camera. In the dim distant past I’d owned a Polaroid Spectra, but not only is that camera lost to the mists of time, you can’t get film for them anymore, and I’ve long since forgotten how to do the whacky emulsion transfers that were all the rage in the late 90s.

New Toy

Enter today’s hero — the Fuji Instax Mini Evo. It’s part shitty point-and-shoot digital, part ersatz-instant, and part mini photo printer. It’s an absolutely daft little camera and I already love it to bits. The ‘camera’ is a 5MP CMOS sensor less than the size of a grain of rice that sees the world through a 28mm lens at f2.0 (both in 35mm equivalent). I’m using the word ‘lens’ pretty charitably here; this whole camera cost 10% of the price of one particularly heavy lens I have but almost never use for my DSLR.

But what a fun camera it is. It’s extremely made of plastic but it looks like a proper piece of kit and if you like that kind of thing as much as I do you’ll adore it the moment you catch a glimpse. It looks all leathery and metallic — like something you’d see around the neck of a genuine 1970s geography teacher from South Australia — but instead of a viewfinder there’s an LCD screen on the back that gives you a jerky live-view of whatever light is making its way through the aperture to the sensor.

Controls and stuff

There’s three tactile controls — a ring around the lens that changes some stuff in software to approximate different lens effects (and allow double-exposures), a lateral dial where you’d expect iso or ev control to be that changes ‘film’ (it basically affects colour cast), and the film-advance lever. The film advance lever says ‘print’ on it, and this is where the magic happens. Crank it to the right and after about 15 seconds you’ll get a less-than-credit-card-sized print of whatever you shot — oozing out of the side of the camera. Like the instant films from back when Methuselah was goal-keeper for Gemorrah United, it takes a satisfyingly long time to develop in front of your eyes before the delightfully imperfect image finally materialises.

Naturally, there’s an app for it. Once the app is on your phone and you’ve paired it over Bluetooth, you’re able to send it anything you want from your phone that you’d like to have as a small enshittified print.

How’s it look? The image on the left below was taken with the 20.1MP RX10 mkIV and futzed with in Lightroom then saved to my iPhone’s camera roll. The right is how it looks when squirted out of the Evo — note that when printing from a phone you get marginally lower res output than you do when printing from the camera itself. Why? Absolutely no idea, but you get what you get and you don’t get upset.

then things get weird(er)

One really odd thing though is that if you want to get digital images from the camera to your phone, then it gets a bit looney tunes. You can use the app to suck images from the camera but that’s if (and only if) you’ve printed the image. If you haven’t printed it, by default you can’t have it. Plug the camera into your computer using the supplied USB cable all you want — it’s charge only, no data. Even odder, when you do get an image, it’s modified to look like a print. Truly, this camera is both beguiling and baffling.

Yes, it’s true. I am this handsome.

But wait! The camera has a microSD slot hidden under a flappy flap of fake leather at what is nominally the underside of the camera. If you pop a card in there, the camera will store your shots on the card rather than the piddling 40-shot onboard memory. Put that card into a computer’s card reader, and there’s all your shots. Brain-meltingly, the shots you’ve printed don’t have that border around them, so if that’s a thing you want then it’s the phone app for you, my strange friend.

As an aside, when you do open the card, you’ll see that every image has an accompanying CSV file. I haven’t experimented with this yet, but I’m guessing that fiddling around with the values in there will change the way an image prints — they certainly seem to reflect the data that’s shown onscreen when you look up photo info using the fiddly little touchpad.

Other stuff

It’s got an unlabeled button on the top that recalls your favourite ‘lens’ and ‘film’ settings. Selfie aficionados are catered-for with a little convex mirror on the front, plus a second shutter release (also on the front) that makes it easier to fire off a shot at arm’s length. Autofocus is surprisingly good. You can noodle around in the menus and set ev up or down a couple of stops. Macro exists, and works at about 10cm. There’s an LED flash (not a red flask, as autocorrect tried to force me to say) behind a fresnel which gives pretty good fill and pops a red-eye reduction flash in before the main burst. Film ain’t cheap — you’re looking at about $A a buck per print unless you can find some special bundles online.

Do You Love it?

This is a silly camera. Your phone, even if it’s 5 years old, has a far better lens and sensor combination. Your phone also does video, audio, and probably even makes calls. For the money (pushing toward $A 300) you could buy a much better photo printer and have enough left over for a good lunch with friends at Nam Loong and a lunch at Nam Loong is a meal.

The reason to get this isn’t because you want quality sensors, good lenses, or all the benefits that computational photography have served us over the past few generations of phone. You get this camera is because you want to play with photos. It’s small enough to take with you (you could conceivably stuff it into a jacket pocket or small bag), but enough of a thing that you’re going to remember you’ve got a camera with you. Shitty cameras aren’t just machines that take cruddy photographs; they’re a pushbutton pathway to photography as play.

Obviously you should buy one this instant.