Last Updated on 03/17/2026 by Chris Gampat
“Your dog is adorable, can I pet?” is what I ask a woman while strolling down 3rd ave in Brooklyn this past weekend. After being granted permission, I gave the friendly young pitbull pets and more pets. Then I asked to take a photo of her dog — which apparently was up for adoption. We got into a conversation about pets for a bit until we parted ways. That’s what happens when you ask for photos of something that you and someone else emotionally connect on. But the lasting impression comes from the Instax print made. In this case, I used the new Fujifilm Instax Mini 13. A few days removed from the event, I’ve come even more into myself. My weekend was great. But that Instax photo will go straight into either the garbage or into a box where I keep lots of other Instax prints.
Editor’s Note: in a previous version of this article, we mistakenly stated that a pack of film comes with the camera. It does not. This has been clarified.
The new Fujifilm Instax Mini 13 costs just under $94 and includes a pack of film for you to make photos with. Once those photos are all used up, you’ll have to buy more film. And depending on what package you buy, Instax Mini film can cost around $1 a photograph.
I’m a bit in love with the new Fujifilm Instax Mini 13 design. You see, I’m in the middle of playing both Pokemon Fire Red and Crystal — so the Fujifilm Instax Mini 13 looks like the Pokemon named Shellder. If I had googlie eyes, I’d affix them to the camera and jokingly call it my first Pokemon. And that’s part of the fun with cameras like this — you can’t take them too seriously.
The new camera comes with two self-timer modes and even a viewfinder that shifts if you’re making images close up or not.
Make no mistake, this camera can bring the right person a lot of joy but the maintenance of that joy is more costly than the sadness you get from watching your GigaPet or Tamagotchi pass away. And like that sadness, the affinity with Instax prints eventually moves on.
I’ve been making images on Instax prints for the entirety of the 16 years that I’ve run the Phoblographer — which is only around 11 years after the format was introduced. It’s about to turn 30 years old, and ultimately, it’s felt like an occasional fling with a human that still needs to do a lot of development.
You see, at one point, I was inspired by Jamel Shabazz’s Albums. And so I printed a lot of my images out on Instax Prints and put them in an album to bring around and show people the type of work I do. But ultimately, it ended up staying in a drawer in my living room.
The problem with Instax isn’t what it is. It’s the price of what it is compared to how fleeting so many images are and how society’s relationship with images has changed. I know that I could open the drawer next to me and find the following:
- Images of an ex and I: she kept two of the photos and I kept two.
- Actually, I did that with several exes.
- A photo of my mother sitting on a couch in the living room of the house where my sister and I mostly grew up.
- An image of my sister doing the same thing as my mother
- There’s a photo of me doing a presentation at the B&H Event Space from when I worked there
- Images of ridiculously pretty women I made photos of in my 20s
- Some pinhole images
- A few TLR photos I made in Coney Island one summer’s day
And there’s lots more.
It’s nice to have those memories, but after a while, they don’t really see life anymore. They stay in a drawer in the same way that my images stay on my website.
Here’s the truth: Instax isn’t cost effective. And none of the Instax cameras around are in a form-factor that make me want to keep coming back to them to make images. If they are, I eventually run out of film and I need to keep buying more. That’s not something that I want to spend more money on.
When I was younger, my parents would try to waste film so that they could develop the images soon. But that was during a time where it made sense to do so economically.
The problem with Instax is ultimately the cost. Sure, you don’t photograph everything with an Instax camera. But you photograph sometimes so little with it that you end up forgetting about it. And just like that, we’ll all forget about all the previous Instax Mini cameras too.