You know the drill—stare through the hole, push the button, and out comes the print. Everybody finds out together whether it’s any good after it develops over the next few minutes.
For the past few years, showing up to a party or a get-together at the bar with a Polaroid has been a surefire way to become the most popular person in the room, at least until the film runs out.
Cheap, quirky cameras have made a comeback. You’ve been at a party, a bar, a club, the beach, and then somebody pulls out a camera with a gimmick. It’s not going to take an award-winning shot. It’s just meant to be spontaneous and novel. Here are the three we’re most in love with at the moment.
Fujifilm
Instax Mini Evo (opens in a new window)
Available at Amazon
Buy Now (opens in a new window)
Available at Walmart
Buy Now (opens in a new window)
Available at B&H Photo Video
Buy Now (opens in a new window)
fujifilm instax mini evo
As one of the few digital instant-print cameras on the market, the Instax Mini EVO has a surprisingly large three-inch screen for checking on your snap before you hit the print button and giving the chance to take a re-do. There are 10 lens effects and 10 film effects, which function like filters, so that you have more control over the final product than a typical instant-print camera.
Archival image quality, these are not. But that doesn’t matter, because the focus with the Instax Mini Evo is on having fun handing two of your closest friends a real, actual, IRL, 2×3″ photo of them in the moment—not in nailing the finest image quality with a killer sensor/lens combo. (If you are after image quality, most of the rest of the picks in this guide will serve you better.)
Camp Snap (opens in a new window)
Available at Huckberry
Buy Now (opens in a new window)
Available at Camp Snap
Buy Now (opens in a new window)
Available at Urban Outfitters
Buy Now (opens in a new window)
camp snap
Its 8 megapixel, F/1.8, 1/3.2″ sensor won’t win any photography awards, and sure, the plastic case feels cheap. But that’s not what the Camp Snap is about. The Camp Snap is a camera for returning you to the moment, not letting you bury yourself in filters that remove you mentally from the room.
This is a digital camera with no screen. Good luck obsessing over whether you took the perfect shot, because they won’t be able to see how it turned out until you transfer the photos off the camera onto a computer and see for yourself.
Flashback One35 (opens in a new window)
Available at B&H Photo Video
Buy Now (opens in a new window)
flashback one35
The dividing line between Millennial and Gen Z isn’t whether you consider Nirvana classic rock or whether you grew up logging onto Facebook to find cool bands or directions to a place where you’d get your tires changed.
It’s whether you ever used those one-time-use, disposable film cameras that you’d have to drop off to get developed or, if you were in a hurry, a one-hour-photo place where you could wait. The Flashback One35 is fashioned after those very disposable film cameras that predominated daily life until the 2000s.
There’s a gimmick, of course. While the photographs are digital, you have to wait 24 hours to receive them via an app, which mimics the wait time of having film rolls developed. Who said waiting can’t be fun…?
The post The 3 Best Party Cameras to Live Out Your ’90s Dreams appeared first on VICE.
