DPReviewTV Instant Camera Shootout: Fujifilm Instax SQ6, Mini 90, Leica Sofort, Mint Instaflex TL70
Instax Film Shootout
If you weren’t hiding under a rock for the last decade, then you will have noticed that the instant film trend, launched back in 1972 with the iconic Polaroid SX-70 and ended in the nineties, is having an impressive revival thanks to Fujifilm Instax products in recent years.
But how was this revival made possible?
Fujifilm was just about to shut down their entire Instax production just like Polaroid did a few years earlier, when an unexpected event breathed new life into the agonizing market. You can find a more in-depth explanation of the several reasons of the boom here.
Since then, the sales numbers have skyrocketed over anything Fujifilm could have hoped and they passed from 100,000 sold cameras in 2004 to 7,500,000 sales in 2017. In the documentary “How Fujifilm survived the digital age”, a Fujifilm Instax employee says they simply can’t keep production up with the high demand.
The market is under firm control of Fujifilm and even more so the instax film market, which, as Polaroid says, is 99% controlled by Fujifilm, and we can now find endless versions of it, such as the Star Wars Instax Film, Comic Instax Film, Hello Kitty film, Candy Pop, Rainbow and so on and so forth.
Now, the instax-revival has motivated other companies to try to get a piece of the cake, too.
Polaroid (now owned by The Impossible Project) is fighting hard to try to regain their old glory, not only by offering their own Polaroid Instant Cameras and Polaroid Instant Printers, but also by bringing Fujifilm to court and accusing them that Fuji’s latest Instax Square Film design is a rip-off of Polaroids’ own film.
Of course as customers we can only be happy that more choices are available on the market now.
Now DPReview TV compared some of the Instant cameras on the market, which all take Fujifilm’s Instax Mini film:
Here is what they say:
