Hi,
Pardon me for I can’t stop raving about Lomography’s products. I find their products are playfully trendy, if that description even works. Its toy-like cameras tells you to stop taking it so seriously and just play. And play is what I did with a spanking new Lomo’Instant Wide from Lomography.
If you guys were following my series, you would’ve know that I got onto their Kickstarter bandwagon when they released the Lomo’Instant, and subsequently the excellent Lomo’Instant Automat. Both were based on the Fujifilm Instax Mini film format. In between these 2 cameras was the Lomo’Instant Wide which at that time, I didn’t have enough spare cash to burn for it. But I never stopped lusting for it. The wide was based on Fujifilm Instax Wide format, so the all the films are still in production and readily available to us, which is great. Today, I fill up the gap in between my Lomo’Instant and Lomo’Instant Automat with this:
So many ‘lomo’ in my previous paragraph… This camera is quite easy to use, the front has a lens with manual focusing with 4 distance markings. Just follow the pictorial markings and its quite self explanatory. Then there’s the shutter button. That’s basically it from the front that you can control. There’s also a selfie mirror, real helpful when framing for a selfie.
On the back, there’s the power switch when you can use to choose between auto mode or bulb mode. Then above it is the exposure compensation toggle. Only 3 settings, +1/0/-1. But with the unpredictability of polaroid, I think this helps me get the right exposure, sometimes not, but well that’s how it is with film. Above the toggle, there’s the multi exposure (MX) button and the flash on/off button. Both with its own indicative LED.
In actual usage, when I brought it out, its size and weight were quite intimidating. Its bigger than my Sony a7II (of course that depends on which lens I had on it), I was a little taken aback due to that. That negative feeling lasted until my first polaroid developed. There is a really big difference in the resulting image when its 2X bigger than the standard Instax Mini. The wide format looked so much better and capture so much details. Its like comparing a full frame sensor to a medium format sensor.
It was quite straight forward to use: Put it to auto, guess the exposure compensation you might need, then just snap. The auto flash is intelligent enough to know when to fire, unlike some other polaroid camera I had long ago with flash that fires every single time I took a photo… Due to that, I always leave the flash on auto and fret not at whether I will look like some pervert with a big camera flashing all over the place.
There are also accessories to go with it. There’s the Ultra Wide Lens with its own viewfinder, a Close Up Lens, and a Splitzer. The Splitzer is a device that when used with the MX mode, you can expose different parts of a single polaroid, like making a collage. I have the most use out of the Ultra Wide Lens because I can make better wefies easily with wifey!
I am very happy with this camera, also thanks Lomography for letting me have the Lomo’Instant Wide. I would’ve love to review everything they have on their catalog if that’s a possibility in future. For now, I’m loving all my Lomo’instant(s). Lets go out and shoot more.
– Simon Tey
