Fujifilm Instax Mini Evo review – A slick love letter to the past

Snapping a photo these days is an essential part of our online identities thanks to smartphones being equipped with astonishingly good technology, but at the same time, what makes the hobby so special feels somewhat…diluted. When you can fill your phone with thousands of high-quality pictures, some of the magic is lost and left to drift in an ocean of similarly excellent snaps.

But there is a solution to that dilemma if you’re looking to make your personal photography feel valuable, as having a tangible reel that you can print photos from means that every image has more thought put behind it. Fujifilm has been making noticeable strides in this area with its Instax line of hardware, but its latest offering might just be its best yet. The Instax Mini Evo balances the needs of the modern-day with a charming retro direction, a love letter to the 1970s with a device that looks and feels great to use.

Looking like it was plucked off the shelf of a secondhand shop, the Instax Mini Evo has a stylish faux leather and chrome look finish, and even though the body is in actuality entirely constructed from plastic materials, it’s still satisfyingly hefty to hold in your hands. The vintage design is complemented by large power, print, and shutter button dials, while the rear has a more modern selection of buttons for navigating through the system’s menus.

The real party trick here is the 3-inch LCD display that sits over the film door, where you can access a variety of options for your photogaphy. You can grab a decent number of photos, sift through them, and apply filters before you print, making each one truly special. You can even send images from your smartphone to the camera using bluetooth pairing, and once paired, it’s surprising to see just how flexible this camera is thanks to additional features such as a remote shutter through the Fujifilm app. If there is an annoying aspect of this link though, it’s that you’re only able to share pictures from camera to phone if they’ve been printed first. Kind of odd.

But let’s pivot to the image quality quick. Using the Instax Rich option that the camera recommends and printing out an image, the end result has a delightfully rich palette of colours, deep blacks, and a sharp autofocus. Each image packs a punch, especially if you’ve got the lighting right, and there’s a staggering number of options you can play with to add the right digital effect to the one image that you want to print out.

The camera itself looks like your typical landscape-orientated rangefinder device, but it’s undoubtedly meant to be used for portrait shots due to the design of the paper that it prints images out on. It is admittedly a touch unwieldy to use one-handed if you’re rocking infant appendages like I am, but the size and the placement of the buttons mitigates this issue decently. Another cool feature on the Instax Mini Evo is that you can twist the lens barrel or effects dial to quickly rotate through dozens of filters, with some impressively creative options available here.

Pulling the lever located on the camera to print out a photo is also endlessly satisfying, as is the act of waving the photo around because apparently, that makes it develop faster. I don’t know if that’s true, but if it worked in the ’70s, then I’m keen to continue that tradition.