Fujifilm's Instax Pal 2 adds a screen and autofocus
The pocket-sized Instax Pal grows up: the Pal 2 arrives with a viewfinder, a 1.3-inch screen, autofocus and 10-megapixel stills.
Fujifilm's Instax Pal 2 trades the original's round, screenless novelty body for something that looks like a shrunken analogue camera. The Pal 2 keeps the palm-sized footprint but adds a built-in viewfinder and a 1.3-inch LCD screen on top, so framing a shot no longer depends on guesswork or a connected phone.
The controls are deliberately retro. There is a shutter button and a joystick on the top plate, plus a lever copied from film cameras that selects the shooting format. Fujifilm is offering the camera in black and white.
What is inside
The Pal 2 uses a 1/3.06-inch CMOS sensor with a primary colour filter and a 28mm-equivalent lens. It records 10-megapixel images at 3776 x 2832 pixels, or 1-megapixel images at 1280 x 960, and saves them as JPEG to roughly 100 shots of internal memory or to a microSD card of up to 2TB. Fujifilm rates the internal memory for about 100 shots when the camera is used without the app.
Shooting formats cover instax mini, SQUARE and WIDE plus a frame-free option, with in-camera effects applied before printing. The camera pairs over Bluetooth with Fujifilm's app and prints through the instax Link range of smartphone printers, and it charges and transfers over USB-C.
What Fujifilm has not said
The product and specification pages cover the design, features and hardware in detail, but Fujifilm has not listed pricing or a UK release date. Anyone hoping to buy one this month will need to wait for the regional stores to catch up with the launch page.
Our opinion
The first Instax Pal was a charming answer to a question nobody had asked, and Fujifilm deserves credit for reading the room rather than repeating it. Adding a screen and autofocus does not make the Pal 2 a conventional compact camera, and it is not trying to be: the point of instax has always been the print, and a camera that gets you to a decent frame faster is a better camera. The part that needs watching is the price. The Pal 2 sits in a crowded pocket between toy cameras that cost pocket money and proper compacts that shoot far better images, and Fujifilm has not yet said where it lands. If it arrives cheap it will sell on charm alone; if it arrives expensive, the charm will have to work very hard indeed.