Thursday, November 21, 2013

Gadgetwise: Review: The Fuji Instax Mini 90 Neo Classic Camera

It’s great to see party pictures instantly on your smartphone, but you can’t easily hang those shots on your refrigerator or tuck one into the frame of a mirror. You can order prints, of course, if you don’t mind waiting.

The new Fuji Instax Mini 90 Neo Classic offers some instant gratification, and it adds a few modern features to the sort of instant film camera introduced by Polaroid in the late 1940s.

Like the instant cameras of the 1970s, when you take a shot with the Mini 90, a motor whirs and a piece of undeveloped film slides out. As you watch, an image gradually appears.

The Mini 90 adds some features not commonly found on cameras of this sort. Settings include “party,” which matches a slow shutter with a flash. The option, more commonly called night mode, allows backgrounds to be seen, giving you the ability to photograph your spouse on a balcony and have the city lights appear in the background. There is also a “kids” setting for faster-moving subjects; double exposure, which puts two images in one shot; and bulb, which holds the shutter open as long as you keep the button pressed.

There is even a brightness adjustment, so you can fine-tune the automatic exposure, and a force-flash option, so you can use the flash to fill in shadows in bright sunlight.

It’s simple to use and produces richly colorful 1 ¾-by-2 ½-inch images that you can hand out on the spot.

Those images are often fun, but are usually of mediocre quality. The framing eyepiece is inaccurate — especially close up — so you don’t always capture what you aim at. Expect a lot of re-dos.

The film you are burning through isn’t cheap — the list price is $2 a shot, although in bulk packs you can drive the cost down to about 75 cents each.

At $200, the cost for this nicely styled little camera is a little steep, but no one said instant gratification was cheap. ROY FURCHGOTT

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