This Is the Instant Camera You Should Buy

Though the medium almost died in the mid-Aughts, instant cameras are now more advanced and more affordable than ever. Some even have Bluetooth. It’s still hard to take a perfect photo with one of them, but that’s part of the fun.

For the record, you no longer need to shake Polaroids. You do need to pay attention to the different film formats, however, because the newly resurrected camera brand now faces tremendous competition from Fujifilm and the wide range of cameras that use its Intax and Instax Square film. For this Battlemodo, we picked the most popular cameras in all the different film formats: the $160 Polaroid OneStep Plus, the $280 Leica Sofort, the $190 Lomo’Instant Automat Glass, the $200 Lomo’Instant Square Glass, and the $130 Fujifilm Instax Square SQ6.

Although they use different film formats and range in prices, all of these cameras have very similar feature sets. So we put the cameras through three battles—design, indoor photography, and outdoor photography—to see which one does it all best.

Design

Unlike almost any digital camera you might buy, some instant cameras double as fashion accessories. But a pretty camera is just a big beautiful paperweight if it’s not great at taking photos. Good design, in this case, is all about usability. How hard is it to turn on the camera and take a photo? How hard is it to adjust settings so that your photos look good? Does the camera even have settings? These are all fair questions.

The camera models we picked for this Battlemodo all have a range of settings. That’s why we picked them over some cheaper models like the Fujifilm Instax Mini 9, which you can buy at Urban Outfitters for about $60. The cameras we tested are more expensive, but they’re also more versatile. The Polaroid, for instance, lets you apply settings and filters through a smartphone app and a Bluetooth connection. The Leica Sofort has a handy LCD so that you can select different modes, timers, and flash options. The Fujifilm Instax Square SQ6 offers the same range of modes but uses a simpler and potentially more elegant series of lights to tell you what options you’ve selected. The SQ6 was also the easiest to turn on and start shooting.

Less elegant were the models from Lomography, the maker of the Lomo’Instant cameras. These were arguably the most interesting-looking devices, but little about the actual operation of them was intuitive. For instance, you have to unfold the Lomo’Instant Square to take a photo, yet it’s not at all obvious how to do that or how to fold it back up. The Lomo’Instant Automat Glass was also hard to turn on and off, as all of its controls were sort of hidden on a twisting ring around the lens. So, in effect, it felt like the Lomo cameras traded hip looks for awkward controls. The Polaroid OneStep Plus suffered from a similar fate. It just wasn’t that fun or easy to use.

In the end, this battle was a close call between Leica and Fujifilm. As handsome as the Leica is, though, the Fujifilm is undeniably easier to use, and it has just as many features as the much more expensive Leica.

Winner: Fujifilm Instax Square SQ6

Outdoor Photography

Our other two battles focused solely on taking photos with these cameras. We started with outdoor photos, which some instant camera owners will never do. Instant cameras are great for indoor parties! However, you can also get some interesting cityscapes and nature shots if the conditions are right.

The conditions for us were cold. We walked around downtown Manhattan and tried to act like tourists, which was fun until we were reminded of some realities that instant cameras face. Polaroid film is sensitive to temperature, so pretty much none of those photos developed correctly. So Polaroid failed in this battle pretty quickly. Meanwhile, both sizes of Instax film are susceptible to bleeding if you don’t let them develop enough before stashing them in a pocket. That happened to us, although the damaged effect was pretty cool.