Instax Share SP-1

In the back of my fridge is a packet of Polaroid 600 film. Polaroid stopped making it back in 2009 and it’s well past its sell-by date. At some point I’ll find a good reason to shoot this last packet. At the point that Polaroid fell by the wayside, it felt as though that was an end to instant film. Certainly there was the Impossible Project, a group who tried to remake Polaroid films, and have indeed managed and continue to sell it. But it’s very expensive, and seemingly a bit more temperamental than the tried and tested original.

But in fact, Fujifilm has been making their own Instax cameras and accompanying film for quite some time now. There are two formats the Wide and the much more common Mini. And they continue to make cameras that can shoot these formats. Despite the growth of digital, and the reduction in the overall range of film that Fujifilm continues to sell, the instant range seems to remain quite vibrant in the market, with regular new camera releases.

For a while now, I’ve been tempted into buying one of these cameras. But do I really need another camera?

I’ll get to the answer of that shortly.

Earlier last year, Lomography ran their latest Kickstarter for the Lomo’Instant Automat. I’m never quite clear why a company the size of Lomography needs to use Kickstarter to get what to me look like “sure things” off the ground – but that’s their regular business model, so I’ll leave them to it.

I didn’t put up any money because for a while I’ve owned an Instax Share SP-1. It’s simply a printer for your phone rather than a camera itself. So instead of going out and buy a new social camera (because let’s face it, these Instax cameras are aimed at social occasions rather than, say, landscape photography), why not employ your current camera and utilise that? More than likely, that’s the camera in your phone.

Furthermore, because you’ve already taken the photo and decided that it’s fit for printing, you don’t have the wastage that you might normally get. It’s true that part of the fun of instant photography was never knowing what you’d get exactly. But with the SP-1, you’re getting something new and different.

There are other advantages too. You can use the full range of image editing software that your phone has at its disposal. So if you like to you use Snapseed, Flickr, Photoshop, VSCO, Pixlr or whatever, you can make the amends before committing your picture to print. And you can make copies! Gone are the days when only one person got a copy of a Polaroid. You can either print multiple copies of a picture, or the device actually has a button on it that will print a duplicate of whatever it last printed.

Instax Mini paper is fairly widely available, at around £15 or so for two packs of ten pictures online. That means about 75p a picture. Certainly not cheap, but not beyond the realms of what’s reasonable.

You use the instax SHARE app on your phone to do the printing – Android and iOS versions are available. The app has various editing functionality itself, as well as the ability to overprint other information and use various templates. I didn’t bother with either, just using the app to print. It actually connects with the printer via WiFi rather than Bluetooth, and in my experience it connected flawlessly, with my phone happily switching between my home network and the printer as required.

The photos get sent through pretty fast, and the printer takes just a handful of seconds to spit out a print. A set of lights on the top of the printer shows how many images are left inside.

The pictures themselves take a Polaroid-like few minutes to properly develop. Indeed, the full richness of the photos doesn’t come through for quite a few minutes after printing. My suggestion is to put your pictures aside and return to them a bit later.

And whatever you do, don’t “shake it like a Polaroid picture,” as Outkast famously sang. When someone did that with one of these pictures with me, I found that the colours were a lot more faded than they should have been, and because of the nature of the photos, the “enclosure” slipped a little meaning there was a black bar down one side of the resulting picture.

Be patient and put them down somewhere.

The printer runs on a couple of CR2 lithium batteries which are rated for about 100 prints. I’m in two minds over this, since on the one hand it means that when you pick up the printer after a while it will probably be charged, on the other hand, disposable batteries wouldn’t appear to be the way forward. Overall, I’ll take the convenience of knowing that the printer is charged over the need to charge it in advance.

(Incidentally, I have previously used the Polaroid Pogo printer, which used Zink technology. I bought mine very cheaply when Polaroid discontinued them, although the principle of that printer is very similar, and the prints became very cheap with online suppliers practically giving them away. However holding a charge from repeated Bluetooth connectivity became a real issue, and the need to charge the printer before use on any occasion removed a lot of the spontaneity of using a device like this. So maybe the certainty that the printer holds charge whenever you decide to grab it is a big plus.)

So is it worth getting? Well, I think it’s your best bet for an instant camera right now, with all the benefits of your phone’s camera (assuming that’s any good) with the fun of instant photography. And let’s face it, far too few of your digital photos ever get printed.

A purist may complain that it’s not really proper analogue photography the same way it would be if it was a proper camera. But I was more than happy with it.

Whether all of that is worth £140 to you is a question that only you can answer, but I really like mine!

[Note: I originally wrote this review some time ago. I’ve revised it a little, but the SP-1 has now been superseded by the SP-2. The key differences seem to be a lack of direct WiFi camera to printer connection (I never used this, always going via my phone), and the inclusion of a rechargeable battery which is a good thing.]


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