Instax film tends to produce pastel-like colors and soft-focus details, giving your photos that unmistakable instant feel, though they tend to be more true-to-life than rivals including Polaroid or Lomography.

The Fujifilm Instax Mini 11 improves on the previous generation Instax Mini in meaningful ways, making instant photography more accessible than ever with a largely accurate auto exposure system and an adjustable lens that works for close-ups and selfies as well as portraits and landscapes. Again as before, the camera can focus between about half a meter to infinity, but twist the lens into selfie / close-up mode and the range adjusts to between 30 and 50cm.

Specifications

Let’s now switch out the Mini 40 on the left for Fujifilm’s most recent INSTAX Square camera, the SQ1 which is obviously much wider. The main difference between them is of course the shape of the prints, square for the SQ1 and tall for the Mini, and since each INSTAX camera or printer can only take one type of film, you should choose a model based on your preferred print shape. The fixed focus lens manages to keep the majority of portrait and middle distance shots looking crisp, while landscapes can appear softer and more dreamlike. Push the lens barrel release and it extrudes using a spring mechanism, with the built-in flash activating automatically.

It's an issue we've seen in other instant cameras, though, so it's more of a learning curve for the photographer than a failing of the camera. With no need to manually adjust the exposure settings every time the lighting situation changes, the Fujifilm Instax Mini 11 has a much greater hit-rate when it comes to correctly judging a scene than the Mini 9, although the nature of Instax film means overblown highlights are still common. Speaking of selfies, now giving the lens barrel an extra pull extends the lens ready for close-up shooting. It's a much simpler system than the Mini 9's easily forgotten clip-on attachment, though you have to grip the lens barrel awkwardly to close it up again, otherwise you end up turning the camera off completely. To show it in action, I’ve filmed the view through the Mini 12’s viewfinder where you can see the old SQ1 camera positioned in the middle. This is with the lens set to the normal distance, but here’s the actual photo taken with this framing, where you can see the subject is off to one side. This is due to the parallax effect at close range where the viewfinder and lens are not showing the same thing.Compare it to the previous Mini 11 seen here, where you’d push a large button to extend the lens and power up the camera, before then manually yanking out the lens further for selfies or close-ups. There's no way to disable the flash, no self timer, and no tripod thread on the bottom. This is about as simple as instant cameras get. There's no way to manually disable the flash, which fires automatically with every shot – whether it's really needed or not. And finally here’s the latest Mini 12, showing-off its less curvy grip, and switching the push power button for a twisting mechanism similar to the INSTAX SQ1.