Week 21 - Fuji Instax Square SQ10 Camera - I have been eagerly awaiting the new Fuji Instax square format camera and film since it was announced last fall and I was able to order one on release day, May 19th. My package arrived the following Monday and I set about charging it up and briefly looking at the instructions. I had already read about the specs in numerous reviews, and on the Fuji Instax Square website and watched all the YouTube video reviews I could find.
I've used two packs of Instax Square film with it so far and I really love the results. I like how I can use the LCD screen on the back of the camera to frame up my shot to get just what I want in the photo and also to make sure the horizontals and verticals are all lined up. Even after making the photo, I can edit it by zooming in, panning left/right, up/down to get the composition just right before printing. I like the editing features where I can add a little vignetting (darker or lighter) a look I really like in my photos. The filters are nice, the ones I like best are the monochrome and sepia ones. Brightness can be adjusted as well. After editing, you can choose to print the photo. I really like that I can go out and concentrate on shooting photos, come back and look through them and choose and edit which photos I want to print. I can make additional prints, make further edits or go back to the original photo setting if I choose. The camera can also be used for traditional instant photo shooting where the photo comes out right after you take the picture.
Another thing that I'd been playing around with is that photos taken on other cameras can be printed from the SQ10. The files have to be saved with four letters and four numbers in the jpeg format into the root folder of the micro sd card that goes into the camera. Files from my iphone worked just fine, but I found that photos I had shot and scanned from film negatives required a little workaround to be read by the camera. I opened the files in Pixlr and saved them as jpegs with the exif data removed, and that seemed to work. I think it's neat that I can print photo scans from film negatives that were shot with some of the vintage cameras in my collection as well as my Holga. This may seem like a lot of trouble to go through, but then isn't film photography more fun when doing things the long way?
I haven't explored the bulb mode or the double exposure setting yet, but overall I am really pleased with the camera. I feel like now I will get many more keepers out of my instax photos than the sometimes hit or miss results of traditional instax and other cameras that use instax film.
