The Fujifilm Instax Mini Evo ($199.95) combines classic instant photography and modern digital tech into one package, relying on a digital sensor to snap photos but letting you print images onto Instax Mini film. The camera marries the charm of modern analogs like the Instax Mini 11 with the trappings of digital imaging, with filter effects and color looks, plus the ability to print only the photos you choose. It’s a fantastic idea, and one that can make point-and-shoots a little more relevant in the era of smartphones. But the camera can be a little frustrating to use—its rear LCD disappoints and the controls aren’t very intuitive, for example. Despite this, it’s still quite possible to fall in love with the Instax Mini Evo and its retro-chic styling enough to overlook any foibles.
A Mix of New and Old With Retro Style
The Instax Mini Evo’s aesthetics are old school. Its construction is as plastic as it gets, but the mix of silver and black faux leatherette make the Evo look a lot like classic film cameras. Nobody will mistake it for a high-end Leica, but it’s easy to see the inspiration for the camera’s aesthetics when you place it beside a chrome rangefinder.
The Evo is a little big for some pockets, at 3.4 by 4.8 by 1.4 inches (HWD), but fits into jackets pretty easily. It weighs about 10 ounces without any film—a pack of 10 Instax Mini prints adds another ounce or so. The Evo is around the same size as its spiritual predecessor, the Instax Mini LiPlay. The LiPlay eschews retro style and tactile controls for a more streamlined point-and-shoot style, and is still available for purchase if you prefer its design.
Where as the LiPlay is designed for one-button operation, the Mini Evo leans heavier on tactile controls. It takes advantage of the retro aesthetics, too—a control ring around the lens swaps through different lens filter effects and a dial on the top plate applies different color profiles. It even features a dedicated lever for printing, styled after an analog camera’s film advance.
The filters and color looks are a big part of the experience. You can swap between retro, mirrored, double exposure, soft focus, fish-eye, and other creative lenses to spice up your photos. I especially like the light leak filter; it adds a bit of colorful flare and simulates the look of a camera that isn’t quite light-proof. You get ten color options and ten filters in total—you can mix and match them together for up to 100 different in-camera creative looks.
It’s fun to experiment with the various options, but there is a caveat—you have to lock them in before you snap a picture. The clever in-camera editing options you got with the square format SQ10 and SQ20 are absent. That’s a shame because editing photos after the fact is useful, especially for images you intend to print.
Image quality isn’t anything to write home about—the Mini Evo’s 1/5-inch CMOS sensor matches up with budget smartphones, not flagships. It snaps 5MP photos, good enough for Mini prints and social shares, but not much else. Recent Samsung Galaxy phones and iPhones offer much more capable camera experiences. But the filters and color profiles are a boon for creators, and wireless connectivity allows you to print photos from your phone’s camera roll.
The camera relies on an internal battery for power, which you recharge via micro USB. We’re a little disappointed to see the older connection type on a new camera, but the box includes a charging cable, so we can’t complain too much.
You get a little bit of internal memory (enough to store about 45 photos), but you need to add a microSD or microSDHC memory card to save additional ones—about 850 images per gigabyte. Memory cards are inexpensive enough, but a more useful amount of internal memory would have been nice.
Instax Mini Evo in the Hand
Despite the dials, snapping photos with the Instax Mini Evo is a push-button experience. The camera has two shutter releases—one at the top, for when you hold it in landscape orientation, and a front button to use when you hold the camera vertically for portraits or selfies. A mirror next to the lens helps you frame self-portraits. Controls feel a little cramped, but get the job done.
I’m not a fan of the rear directional pad—it’s tiny, so you need to be careful to press it in the correct direction. You use it to set some manual exposure options (to tune exposure, plus toggle the flash and macro focus), as well as to change the white balance via an on-screen menu. You also use the d-pad to navigate between photos in playback (left or right buttons) and to activate an in-camera crop so you can frame your prints (up and down buttons).
The wide-angle lens is good enough for shots of one or two people together—its 28mm angle is just a little narrower than the main lens on most smartphones. It’s fairly bright too, with a fixed f/2 aperture, but the Evo still relies on its built-in flash for photos in typical home lighting. The flash is an LED, like the one on smartphones, but offers a bit of soft diffusion and better reach than bare smartphone lenses because of its fresnel surface finish.
The rear display is a weak point. The 3-inch screen isn’t super sharp, at just 460k dots in resolution, but this isn’t a high-res camera. Viewing angles and screen brightness are a bigger problem. You basically have to look at the screen dead-on or it appears totally washed out. In bright light, it’s tough to cut through the glare, even when viewing it directly. The Evo is frustrating to use outdoors, especially on a bright winter day.
You can still get a sense of the frame in bright, glare-inducing conditions, but it’s tough to really see what’s happening. As such, you need to trust the Evo to focus on the right subject. In practice, I found that it does a very good job—it only misfocused a couple of times.
A cold shoe optical viewfinder accessory is another option. You can snag any optical accessory finder with 28mm frame lines, put all your trust in the autofocus, and frame up shots like you would with a true analog alternative. Cost may be an issue—these add-ons can run $200 new (as much as the camera itself), but you can scour eBay and other virtual flea markets for vintage (and more affordable) alternatives. We expect more photo enthusiasts than casual snappers to pursue this route.
Print From Your Phone Via Bluetooth
The Mini Evo isn’t just a camera, it’s also an Instax film printer—it features Bluetooth 4.2+LE connectivity for easy connections to smartphones. I tried the Instax Mini Evo companion app with an iPhone.
The app does a few different things: It prints images from your phone, provides remote controls for the camera, and transfers photos from the camera to your phone for easier social shares. Not everything works flawlessly—because the live feed transmits over Bluetooth, not Wi-Fi, the view is slightly choppy, for example. The live view takes up only a small portion of your phone’s screen too, so it can be difficult to use effectively. Additionally, none of the Evo’s creative filters or colors are available when you use the remote camera controls—it’s a workable, but underwhelming, implementation.
Printing images from your phone to the Mini Evo comes without any real restrictions; it only takes about five seconds to transfer and start printing a photo. You can use any editing app on your phone to get the look right, too.
Getting photos off the Evo and onto your phone isn’t quite as seamless. It’s not so much the process—transfers are painless—it’s what you’re allowed to transfer. For some reason, the Evo can send only images you have already printed to your phone. The app also adds a virtual film border around the photo that matches the look of Instax film and puts the framed photo onto a color background—it’s white by default, but you can set a custom color or make it transparent.
The restriction on what images you can transfer is a bit baffling, and unfriendly to the end-user—what if you want to edit some photos on your phone before printing? It also leads to financial and environmental waste. Printing photos that you may not otherwise want leads to extra film packs in landfills and additional expenses. Instax Mini film costs about $0.65 a frame, for reference.
For your money, you get a print on photographic film. Instax shots use chemistry, not thermal paper like rival format Zink. The resulting image is wallet-sized (1.8 by 2.4 inches of image area), with a glossy finish and colors that pop with saturation and contrast. In comparison, Zink prints struggle to show certain tones, especially pinks and magentas, and suffers from heavy dithering all over.
Is the Instax Mini Evo the Digital Instant for You?
Your feelings about the Fujifilm Instax Mini Evo may say more about you as a photographer than about the Evo itself. Casual snappers are more likely to forgive the rather clumsy controls, while photographers who typically use high-quality interchangeable lens cameras may take more issue. We’d love to see a more polished take on this concept with a better display and a built-in optical viewfinder.
The creative filters and built-in printer go a long way to make the Mini Evo stand out from smartphones, which have replaced point-and-shoot compacts for most folks. But the camera doesn’t take them all the way home—for example, you can add filters only before you take a photo, not after.
Smartphone integration is also underwhelming. You lose access to any creative looks when you use it as a remote control, and the app limits you to transferring only those photos you have already printed, a restriction that’s unfriendly to the consumer and totally unnecessary. Going the other direction—printing photos from your phone—works just fine.
Put it all together and you’ve got an odd amalgamation of features in an instant camera. The retro looks are sure to attract shutterbugs, but the camera is a little frustrating to use in practice. It’s a stronger bet for folks looking for a print-on-demand option for instant photography, with the filters and film styles you don’t get from analog cameras like the Instax Mini 11. Pros may pick it up, scratch their heads a bit, and go back to using more capable imaging equipment. Newcomers weaned on smartphone photography will certainly miss the high-end computational options of flagships, but might be won over by tactile Instax prints and the creative in-camera filter effects. Everything about the Evo screams love it or hate it—so take our opinions with a healthy dose of salt.
