Fujifilm's Tiny New Camera Takes Pics for Instant Prints
Fujifilm has announced the Instax Pal 2, a follow-up to its Instax Pal digital camera. It costs $169.95 in the US and is reported to launch later this month. The Verge
The first Instax Pal came out in October 2023. It was round, fit in the palm, and had no screen or viewfinder. It was the first model in the Instax series specializing in taking pictures, built as a 4.9-megapixel camera and bundled with two Instax components designed to work together with the camera. The Verge
The Pal 2 looks different. It is shaped like a tiny old-style film camera. It has a viewfinder window and a 1.3-inch screen on top for lining up shots. It has a shutter button, a joystick, and a lever on top, plus a flash, tripod mount, and self-timer.
Inside, it uses a 1/3.06-inch sensor, which works like digital film, with an f/2.2 28mm lens that takes in a wide view. It takes photos up to 10-megapixels in size. It can focus on its own, find faces if you turn that on, and lets you change ISO, shutter speed, and exposure compensation to control brightness and sharpness.
The Pal 2 has no printer built in. It pairs with Fujifilm's mobile app to select and download image effects and upload images for printing. It connects by wireless Bluetooth or a slide-out USB-C port. Power comes from a rechargeable battery claimed to provide up to three hours of use.
It offers a total of 30 effects for creating images with distinctive moods and styles, according to company materials, alongside five filter themes. Fujifilm Users can choose from four shooting formats: mini, SQUARE and WIDE formats with instax frames, and a No Frame format. Fujifilm
An instax Animation shooting mode captures 10 frames to create a flipbook-style animation. The camera ships with a Camera Angle Adjustment Accessory intended to simplify angled and group shots.
In my view, Fujifilm made a practical choice by leaving the printer out. It kept taking photos and printing them separate, with the phone in the middle for effect management and printing. That keeps the body small, keeps print format flexible across mini, SQUARE and WIDE, and pushes color science and framing overlays into software where they are cheaper to iterate. For a simple camera like this, those manual brightness settings stand out.
The broader context here is easier shooting. A 1.3-inch top screen plus viewfinder will not replace a phone display for checking detail. But with face detection autofocus and exposure compensation, it fixes the main complaint about the first Pal: shooting blind. My children learned photography on phones, where the screen is the camera. A small camera that asks you to look through a tiny finder and wait for a print is different, and that is why it can work well as a fun second camera.
