Fujifilm Instax mini Link 3 review: the joy of photography, the pleasure of giving

Ergonomics

An update in small touches

Let’s be blunt: the Instax mini Link 3 looks a lot like version 2, which itself was a copy of the original version! As you can see, Fujifilm is not renewing the genre, but is bringing some welcome improvements.

The first is the support of Bluetooth 5.1 to ensure a more stable and efficient wireless connection with compatible smartphones. The mini Link 2 uses the Bluetooth 4.2 protocol. As required by European standards, the small portable photo printer is now equipped with a USB-C connector for charging. Note that it takes less than 2 hours to fully charge the accessory and that a full charge can print around a hundred photos.

The main button has been moved to the side of the printer. It serves as both a power button and a remote shutter release when using the printer with a smartphone and the Instax mini Link app (iOS and Android).

There are also several colored LEDs under the instax letters on the upper part. These LEDs indicate the status of the connection between the smartphone and the device, the photo printing process, as well as the battery level.

Simple and effective application

The Fujifilm Instax mini app evolves over the iterations of the small pocket printer. The version 6.0.0 tested is rich enough to deserve a little attention. You can naturally print your images directly from your smartphone, create decorations with personalized frames or assemblies of several photos (up to eight shots…), sometimes difficult to read. Apparently, the possibility of printing a photo on several prints has disappeared, too bad. Via the app, it is also possible to extract an image from a video to print it.

You can also control your smartphone remotely by manipulating the printer remotely (zoom, trigger). The curious Compatibility Test mode is still present. This mode evaluates your degree of compatibility with your friends by analyzing one or two photos of you and/or by answering five random questions out of a total of 30 different questions! Depending on the answers or image analysis, a level of concordance will be displayed as a percentage on the print and five gauges will appear at the bottom.

Two new features have appeared with the Instax mini Link 3: Click to Collage and InstaxAIR Studio. The first allows you to assemble several photos from a photo shoot. More surprising and a bit abstruse, the InstaxAir Studio allows you to add elements in virtual reality at the time of shooting. The implementation is unfortunately too often laborious, in particular the automatic detection of the ground to correctly generate artificial backgrounds.

The software lets you add an animated background effect (floating hearts, sparkles, confetti, etc.) that freezes in the image when you take a shot. You can also use photos to integrate them into a scene, add text and other graphic elements to your composition, and insert your subjects inside. The results are pretty good, though a little kitsch.

Finally, we regret that we still cannot print images from a computer (we can always emulate Android, but oh well). We believe that currently, we can forget about a macOS or Windows application — who said Linux?

Image quality

The Instax mini Link 3 printer uses the Instax mini films that we are now very familiar with and which have not been improved in recent years. The camera therefore prints with a resolution of 12.5 dots/mm, or 318 dpi with dot pitches of 80 μm. Instax technology allows 256 levels per color channel (RGB, or red, green and blue) for a total of 256³ = 16,777,216 shades of color.

Precision

Credit card-sized prints easily support the low print resolution of Instax technology. In this area, thermal sublimation printing (Kodak Photo Printer Mini) remains superior. Finally, the results are quite close to what we obtain with the ZINK technology used by Canon with the Zoemini.

Color fidelity

The printing of photos from smartphones is therefore rather correct. In any case, it is the best that can be done in instant photography for a typical “silver” print. However, as is often the case, you should not expect faithful color rendering.

Armed with our spectrophotometer and after analyzing our test charts, we measured an average delta E of 9.4 with the Instax-Rich printing mode (default). A score that is at least high and indicates less color fidelity. As a general rule, for the human eye not to detect colorimetric variations, the delta E must be less than 3. In this mode, yellow is at least far from reality. In Natural mode, the value is even higher (11.3).

In the end, Fujifilm still enjoys a unique photographic rendering, certainly not the best technically, but the closest to a much sought-after “Polaroid” rendering.

Fujifilm Instax mini Link 3 (images scanned from a Google Pixel 8 with Instax UP!)

Instax Mini films are quite common and come in packs of 10 or 20 photos. Depending on the store, a pack of 10 films costs between €8 and €12, which corresponds to a unit price of €0.80 to €1.20. For a pack of 20 films, the price varies from €17 to €20, or a cost per photo of €0.85 to €1.00. Some stores also offer packs of 40 or 50 films, sold for €34 and €40 respectively, thus keeping the price per photo around 80 cents.

For less expensive prints, you will want to look at the Canon Zoemini which uses another printing technology (Zink) whose consumable prices allow a print cost of around €0.60. Note that you can also look at Kodak with its thermal sublimation printer Photo Printer Mini, which offers excellent image quality for, again, a cost of €0.60 per print.

How does the rating work?

Pretty, compact, autonomous and delivering decent prints quickly, the small Instax mini Link 3 photo printer is a success. If the budget follows, it becomes difficult to resist the urge to share your photos everywhere around you.