The Polaroid Blog

While online looking for the FP-100C instant film I’d heard that Fuji makes for medium format Polaroid backs and Land cameras, I came across a very interesting camera, the FUJIFILM Instax 200. I was intrigued to find Fuji was making their own integral pack film, as it appeared to comparable to the now defunct Polaroid One 600 Ultra which had been one of my favorite cameras to shoot with other than my 8×10. I promptly ordered a camera along with some film, and immediately began shooting with it. Very little information can be found online about the Instax, so when I came up with the idea for this site, a comparison review of two cameras seemed like the obvious course of action.

The first thing you’ll notice upon seeing the Fuji Instax 200 is the unique, (dare I say absurd), look of the camera itself. With it’s very large rounded body, constructed out of gray and purplish plastic, it has design that looks like it might have been created by the Asian branch of Fisher-Price. While the camera sits comfortably in my large hands, it’s size rivals that of large medium format rangefinder. The cameras viewfinder, which Fuji describes as Reverse Galilean style, actually protrudes slightly from the left side of the body, and while clear and easy to use, it does exhibit a degree of parallax error as any viewfinder camera would, as well as slightly cropped view compared with the actually image produced.

The first difference you’ll notice between the actual images from the Instax and the 600 is the format. The actual image portion of the Polaroid is square, where as it is a landscape oriented rectangle that’s actually slightly wider than the 3×2 aspect ratio of 35mm film on the Fuji. Although the aspect ratio of the images produced is different, the focal length lens paired with the format of each camera produces a field of view that is actually quite similar. The next thing you’ll notice is how much sharper the Instax’s are compared to the Polaroid’s, it’s really quite a significant difference. This is almost certainly a result of the Instax 200’s superior Fujinon lens with two focal length settings, .9m~3m and 3m~infinity, which when appropriately used produce much sharper fine details than the single fixed focal length plastic lens on the One 600 Ultra. 

Another noticeable difference between the two instant camera’s images is the increased contrast, saturation, and vividness of the Instax over the Polaroid. This produces images that still have an instant camera aesthetic of the integral pack Polaroid, but in a way that seems more in-line with what you’d expect from Fujifilm’s color characteristics. The Fuji also seems to have much cleaner looking whites than the Polaroid. The on-camera flash is another area where the Instax 200 shows some differences from the 600, in ways that can be both good or bad depending on way your shooting. This is due to the fact that the Instax’s flash is noticeably more powerful than the Polaroid’s, which is fairly impressive considering the One 600 Ultra’s flash is quite powerful itself. The greater illumination power of the flash may be partially due to the higher film speed of the Instax film, ISO 800 vs. ISO 640 with 600 film. The good thing about a more powerful flash is even greater illumination in dark shooting situations. The downside is that same power has the tendency to blow things out pretty badly when your subject matter is too close.

The Instax does have other issues as well, most notably would probably be the extremely strange reaction caused when the image contains and extremely strong specular highlight. In the very center of the highlight a black dot appears, most commonly in the center of the reflections caused by the flash on a reflective surface. This issue also sometimes appears as a strange bright green hue encompassing the entirety of the highlight, for instance if you were to shoot an image of a reflective road sign at night. Although this is a bizarre, unexpected, and unwelcome phenomenon, the Instax performs very well overall, and so this can be accepted as a minor flaw since it occurs rather infrequently. A more common issue that the Instax experiences is something that it shares with 600, slightly strange performance in cold weather. Polaroid film has long been know to have a strange color cast on the image when it is developed in cold weather, and with the Fuji this effect appears to present itself more consistently as slight magenta coloration on the right and left sides of the image.

Overall, I’ve found the Fuji Instax 200 a worthy replacement for my beloved Polaroid One 600 Ultra, although it’s not without is it’s own instant camera quirks. Bellow I’m posting a set of comparison images so you can see how each camera reacts to the same situation. The actual image size is approximately the same, but the format constraints of the blog make the Instax look smaller. But it’s not really, an Instax measures 4.25″x3.375″ and a Polaroid 600 measures 3.55″x4.3″. The color hasn’t been adjusted at all for these scans, so the magenta edges of the Instax’s shot in the cold actually appear slightly more severe than they do in the actual physical images, but I decided not to correct this as it will give you a better idea of how that phenomenon looks. Also take note of the black dot the center of the Fuji’s specular highlights on a few of the images shot with a flash.