Here’s my hot take: I prefer my cameras to look like cameras. Fujifilm took that thought to heart with its revised Instax Pal camera. It’s still the same mobile app-based pint-sized instant camera, but this time they included those intrinsic camera concepts like a viewfinder and a frame advance lever that doesn’t actually advance frames.
The $170 Instax Pal 2 is a pint-sized camera small enough to fit in your palm. Despite its size, it takes the guise of many of Fujifilm’s past cameras with its silver frame and ridged black middle section. As for the miniscule 1/3.06-inch sensor itself, it’s a small f/2.2 aperture that does actually have some customizability, including a shutter speed between 1/4 and 1/8000 seconds and an ISO you can set between 100 and 1600.
Despite the included 1-inch LCD display on top, the Pal 2 is one of those instant cameras you need an app to fully operate. The camera itself can hold up to around 100 photos, though you’ll be able to transfer the rest through the Instax Pal app. If you want to expand storage, Fujifilm also included a handy microSD card slot. The app also lets you work the camera as a remote shutter if you’re trying to print that standalone selfie with your friends.
And if it weren’t already clear, the Pal 2 does not have any printing capabilities built-in. For that, you’ll need a separate Instax printer, such as the new Instax Link Wide printer. You can also connect the Pal 2 to another Instax camera with included printing abilities, like the Instax Mini 41.
The Pal 2 also includes five filter themes you can set directly on the camera. These aren’t Fujifilm’s typical filmic recreation filters you’ll find on its popular X100VI or X-T30 III 35mm full-frame equivalent shooters but are instead more Instagram-friendly filters that you’ll be able to see in your final prints. The Pal 2 also lets you print in either square or wide instant film, making this a surprisingly versatile instant camera.
The latest in Fuji’s popular Instax line will also let you take a quick burst of 10 photos and print them out to become a kind of flip-book-style animation. It’s all packed into a camera that looks the part, even if the frame advance lever only seems to change the camera from single shot to burst mode. There’s also a separate flash built into the camera body. All in all, it’s a major step up over the original Intax Pal from 2023. If you don’t remember what that looks like, it was a squat blob of a camera that looked more like a baby monitor than an instant shooter.
For reference, the older Pal looked like this:
Yeah, let’s just say the new one actually looks the part of an ultra-portable camera.
