We’re continually astonished with how many models of instant cameras Fujifilm continues to release. It’s a testament to how popular instant print continues to be. This time around, the outfit is releasing the Fujifilm Instax Mini 99, which brings a whole new way of adding color filters to your instant prints.
While the Instax brand started with simple shoot-and-print instant cameras with very little settings to fiddle with, more recent releases have allowed for more creative leeway, making it feel more like a serious camera. That continues with this analog model, which adds color filters, brightness adjustments, and focus modes, among other creative options, giving you plenty of room to flex your creative muscles.
The Fujifilm Instax Mini 99 can capture images and print them on the spot, much like any instant camera in the market. It comes in a somewhat chunky, squarish body similar to many models they’ve released in the past, with an all-black aesthetic that gives it a more professional flair. It’s equipped with a 60mm f/12.7 optical-grade plastic lens, which produces an angle close to a 35mm full-frame lens, with manual focus and three zones, namely close-up, midrange, and distant. There’s a flash, of course, for capturing subjects in dim light, which you can turn off if you’d rather not have the added lighting.
On top of the camera, it features dial on either end – one controls the color effects and the other controls the exposure. The color effects have seven settings, namely light blue, faded green, sepia, warm tone, soft magenta, light leak, and neutral, each of which adds a different color to the image using tiny LED Lights inside the camera body, while the exposure control has five levels to adjust the amount of light in the scene.
The Fujifilm Instax Mini 99 also has a vignette mode that you activate a switch, which protrudes the blades inside the lens to give the shot a more artistic feel, as well as options for bulb exposure and double exposure for even more creative shots. There’s also an indoor mode that adds lighting to the image when you’re shooting inside with little natural light, a sports mode that reduces blur for moving subjects, and a macro mode for subjects between 30 to 60 cm away. The camera can shoot in both landscape and portrait, by the way, with separate shutters on top and on the side to make it easier to capture shots in either orientation. It also gets 10-second a timer if you want to put yourself in the frame, although it doesn’t come with a screen to make selfies easier.
Basically, there’s a lot of ways you can experiment with the newest Instax camera Do note, this is an analog instant print camera, so the price of experimenting will be pretty costly (anyone who’s bought a pack knows how expensive those things are). It runs on Fujifilm’s NP-70S battery, which holds enough charge for up to 100 instant prints.
The Fujifilm Instax Mini 99 comes out next month, priced at $199.95.