Fujifilm Instax Pal 2 Adds Viewfinder, Manual Exposure and 10MP Capture
Fujifilm has announced the Instax Pal 2, a follow-up to its Instax Pal digital camera, priced at $169.95 in the US and reported to launch later this month. The Verge
The original Instax Pal launched in October 2023. It was a palm-sized camera with a round design that lacked a screen or viewfinder. It was the first model in the Instax series specializing in taking pictures, built as a 4.9-megapixel digital camera and bundled with two Instax components designed to work together with the camera. The Verge
The Pal 2 uses a different shape. It looks like a miniaturized analog film camera, with an optical viewfinder and a 1.3-inch LCD screen on top for framing shots. Control is physical. There is a shutter button, a joystick, and a functional lever on top, plus a flash, tripod mount, and self-timer.
Inside, the Pal 2 uses a 1/3.06-inch sensor, the chip that records light, paired with an f/2.2 28mm lens, a wide-angle lens with a fairly wide opening for low light. It captures images up to 10-megapixels in size. It has autofocus with optional face detection, plus adjustable ISO, shutter speed, and exposure compensation, which control sensitivity, capture time, and brightness.
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, and connects via wireless Bluetooth or a slide-out USB-C port. Power comes from a rechargeable battery claimed to provide up to three hours of use.
The Pal 2 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, and the camera ships with a Camera Angle Adjustment Accessory intended to simplify angled and group shots.
In my view, the telling choice is what Fujifilm left out. It did not integrate a printer. It kept capture and output separate, with the phone as intermediary 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 camera in this class, manual exposure control is unusual, and it shifts the Pal from a point-and-transmit toy toward a constrained but usable photographic tool.
The broader context here is the viewfinder and exposure pairing. A 1.3-inch top LCD plus optical finder will not replace a phone display for critical review. But combined with face detection autofocus and exposure compensation, it addresses the central complaint about the first Pal: shooting blind. My kids learned photography on phones, where the screen is the camera. A device that asks younger users to frame through a tiny finder and wait for a print is swimming upstream, which is why it works best as a second camera that makes printing deliberate and fun.
