Okay, so there’s this hobby that I’ve gotten into: printing my smartphone photos. Across the years, the best travel photos or the best clicks, I’ve always liked to get them printed and store them. Now, Fujifilm sent us their entire portable printer, and this is by far the smallest camera I have seen from a serious camera company. Now, before we get to the article, the printer usually comes in this box. You get the printer, of course. Some paperwork, Type-C cables, and these mobile printers are very different from these big printers. Like here, you need to buy cartridges or colors. You can use any paper, and the printer will use a combination of these four colors to print line by line, but in these portable inkless printers, if you open them, there’s a slot for paper, here’s the print button, and that’s it.
There’s no color or printing, so the entire magic is in these film shots, and these film shots themselves contain all the colors, so these portable printers are inkless printers. The advantages of these printers are that they are compact, they don’t take time to print, and the print quality is way better for photos. However, you have to only use these film shots. The film shots will cost somewhere between $50 and $100 per sheet. Now, Fujifilm also sells these cool designer film shots. Like, they have this soft lavender film shot. There are a lot of color film shots on Amazon. My favorite is this black Instax film shot. This looks pretty dopey and retro to me. Now, printing is pretty easy. You need to download the Instax SquareLink app. Now, depending on the printer you get, the QR code is present on the box of the printer. Once you open the Instax SquareLink app, you have to pair the printer via Bluetooth. Now, the first time you put up the pages in the printer, for a test shot, it just rolls out the protector. Now here, I can select the filter style. I really like this auto-filter; it just enhances the overall photo quickly. Now the print takes some time to appear, like you don’t need to shake the film shots like this; this is not an old-school camera reel, and it has that slightly contrasty, slightly darker retro film vibe. Now, how is the print quality? So we got some glossy paper for our inkjet printer, and now we’re taking the same photo to a print studio, and we’ll get it printed. We had to print this photo; what was the price? Bro was using Photoshop CS3, and it launched back in 2007. So this is the is the first photo we took from our inkjet printer, which is found in everyone’s house, and if you see the color wear off, it sticks to my hand.
This is not at all doable. And the second photo we took from a studio cost us about Rs. 100 for a print, and the third one is from the Instax portable printer. And if you see them side by side, both prints have about the same quality. Instax print has a slightly retro and contrasty vibe, but both of them are pretty much the same. Now Instax has different kinds of portable printers, like the Instax Square Link, the Instax Mini Link 2, and the Instax Link Wide. This link is for getting wide prints. This one’s cool, Instax Link 2. While printing, you can press this button, and now I can use AR effects like spray paint over the photo. Or when you’re using the Instax camera app, you can move the printer forward to zoom in, and you can move it back to zoom out on the photo. Air gestures. And finally, we have this pocket-sized camera. It costs $11,000, and this is fun. You get this head that acts as a viewfinder, like this is to see what photo you’re going to click. Like, see, now I can see Sayan. This is a 1 by 1.5 inch CMOS sensor. I can either put up an SD card directly or just connect it to the Instax PAL app, click photo, then classic shutter sound, and then you can directly download the photos from the mobile app. Also, you can choose the aspect ratio of the photo, whether you want it square, vertical, wide, etc., but is it better than your phone camera? Well, we took up the challenge. And now, we’ll take a similar-priced phone. Okay, a good photographer can take good pictures with anything. Keep the same spirit when you lose. I’ll take this pocket camera, and Sayan will take this similar-priced phone camera, and we’ll get 15 minutes with our model, Dinesh Bhai. We’ll take three photos; time starts now. I’m done; I just took… You have like nine and a half minutes; you have nine minutes remaining. It doesn’t matter; I don’t need so much time. Yes.
So your time starts now. Go, go, go. I need some props. I lost the viewfinder. One thing I can say is that it’s very hard to shoot without a viewfinder. You actually don’t know what you’re clicking. That’s why it’s called a viewfinder. I think we’re good to go. I think we’re good to go. Alright. So out of these six photos, which one do you like? Like three of them. You have to choose. This one. Ah. Okay. This is one. So I will go for this. Shit! Seriously? Yeah, yeah, why not? What do you work the camera in? These were all taken on this. Oh, nice. And I took all of them. Say, I took the ones that you said by this shutter clock. So most of them chose this phone camera photo. Although the reason was mostly because the framing is good or the vibe of the photos is different, They look good in print. So, at the end, it’s not about the device that you have in hand. It’s the eye behind the camera, finally. But credit where due; this photo was the best, and the idea was nice. Now, this was a fun video. To answer your question, see, in this day and age, your social media photo is really public. People curate their photos and upload them to Instagram. I personally have stopped posting random photos on Instagram. I would rather not print my memories. So for people like me who are enthusiastic about cameras, photos, and printing, of course, a mobile printer will be a good hobby. But for most people, I think a phone camera and Google Photos are good enough. From that point on, this has been signing off.
