At a Glance
Expert’s Rating
Our Verdict
An attractive, retro-tinged design and solid feature set are enough to make the Instax SQ6 an easy recommendation – throw in the low price point and it becomes one of the best instant cameras on the market right now. If you want to shoot square format instant prints without breaking the bank, this is probably the camera for you.
Best Prices Today: Instax Square SQ6
Instax boasts that the SQ6 is its ‘first square format analogue instant camera’, which might confused anyone who remembers the Instax SQ10 – but since that was technically a digital-analogue hybrid, we’ll let Instax sneak through on a technicality.
The SQ6 then is a straight-up analogue instant camera , taking the Polaroid-esque square format Instax film and sticking it in a classic analogue camera, complete with a retro design, an impressive feature set, and a very attractive price.
Release date and price
The SQ6 is out in both the UK and US, priced at £124.99 / $129.95 .
That makes it the cheapest camera around right now that uses the Instax Square format – massively undercutting Instax’s own SQ10 ( £219/$279 ) and even the similarly specced Lomo’Instant Square ( £179/$239 ). The next camera in the Square range is rumoured to be the Instax Sqaure SQ1 .
As with any instant camera, you also have the film itself to consider. Prices can vary a lot, but Instax Square film tends to run slightly more expensive than the smaller Instax Mini format. At the time of writing, prices are around £8.99/$12.50 for a pack of 10 shots , though prices tend to drop if you’re willing to bulk-buy.
Instax has also used the new camera as an excuse to launch packs of square film with a black border, with an official price of £9.99 / $14.99 for 10 shots.
Note that there’s no film included with the camera, so you’ll have to buy at least one pack from the get-go if you want to use it immediately.
Design and build
Instant cameras tend to sit in two camps when it comes to design: those that shoot for plasticky and modern, and those that try instead to look plasticky and retro.
The Instax SQ6 is defiantly in the latter camp, embracing old-fashioned aesthetics with a chunky design that’s most reminiscent of the company’s previous Instax Mini 90 model.
The super-sized lens housing extends out when you turn the camera on, while the hefty flash also juts out from the main body. On the back, there’s a slight lip to the battery compartment (two CR2 batteries , included) which serves as a comfortable grip for the main body, while the slightly ridged rear also helps you keep a tight grip.
Buttons are simple: the shutter button sits next to the lens on the front, the power slider is on the top of the body, and on the back you’ll find another three controls: one button to cycle through the various camera modes, one to turn on the timer, and one to disable the flash. Beyond that there are LEDs to let you know which mode you’re on, an analogue ticker to tell you how many shots are left, a selfie mirror, and that’s basically it.
We’ve reviewed the Graphite Grey model, but you can also get it in Blush Gold and Pearl White – the only changes being to the colour of the area around the main lens, and the power button on the top.
It’s a simple design, but it looks great, and the introduction of a few modern touches means the SQ6 is less achingly retro than the faux-leather coated Mini 90. This feels like one of the first instant cameras to successfully bridge the gap between its vintage roots and the modern market – along with the much pricier Leica Sofort , our current favourite.
Features and image quality
As we said earlier, with the SQ6 Instax has returned to its analogue origins, ditching the digital hybrid features of the SQ10. That means no microSD storage, no fancy filters, and no snazzy effects – beyond what you can do with old-fashioned light and film.
The SQ6 has a good few modes to choose from. The default is auto exposure, which is your basic point-and-shoot mode, with refinements designed to brighten both the subject and background of photos.
We found it gave us crisp, clear photos, with some of the brightest colour reproduction we’ve seen in an instant camera to date. Plenty of instant cameras give slightly faded shots which, intentionally or not, echo the look of faded Polaroid prints. By contrast the SQ6 gave us colours closer to a good phone camera – which may or may not be what you want from it.
Beyond the default mode, you get selfie, macro, and landscape modes, each of which has brightness and focal length tuned for their purpose. Then there’s double exposure, which lets you expose a shot twice, to overlay one image on top of another, and lighten and darken modes so you can play with lighting too.
If those aren’t enough options for you, Instax also throws in three colour filters: orange, purple, and green. Here the chunky flash really makes sense, as the filters are solid bits of plastic you can clip on top of the existing flash, rather than the flimsy gel filters you get with Lomography’s cameras, which have always felt like the sort of thing you’ll lose within a week of owning the camera.
If you’re looking for a square format Instax camera, the SQ6 is easy to recommend. It’s half the price of the clunky SQ10, and only a fraction more than Polaroid’s own OneStep 2 , which uses more expensive prints.
The closest rival is the Lomo’Instant Square, which we’re also big fans of. That packs in more features (extended exposures, multiple exposures, and an optional attachment to print in Instax Mini format too), but you’ll pay a good chunk more for it – we suspect most users will be totally happy with the core features of the SQ6, and it’s only serious photography nuts that will get their money’s worth out of upgrading to the Lomography.
Best Prices Today: Instax Square SQ6
Author: Dominic Preston, Contributor, Tech Advisor
Previously Tech Advisor’s Deputy Editor, Dom covers everything that runs on electricity, from phones and laptops to wearables, audio, gaming, smart home, and streaming.
Recent stories by Dominic Preston:
- Instax Square SQ40 review
- Kodak Step Instant Camera review
- Kodak Step Instant Printer review
At a Glance
Expert’s Rating
Pros
- Portable design
- Affordable
- Easy to use
Cons
- A few bugs in the app
- Charges via Micro-USB
Our Verdict
The Kodak Step Printer is a reliable, affordable instant photo printer. It doesn’t do anything its rivals don’t, but it costs less and has few flaws to undermine its appeal.
Best Prices Today: Kodak Step Instant Printer
The Kodak Step Instant Printer – not to be confused with the similarly named Kodak Step Instant Camera – is a cheap and cheerful Zink printer that can connect to your phone to print your favourite shots on compact sticky-backed Zink prints.
There are plenty of other similar Zink printers out there, and the Kodak Step doesn’t do anything revolutionary that the rest don’t. But it’s cheap, compact, and gives you plenty of easy editing options – making this one of the better options in a crowded field.
Design and build
- Simple plastic design
- Range of cheery colours
- Compact
Kodak has kept things simple with the Step printer.
This is a compact plastic brick, small enough to slip into a pocket or handbag. Available in white, black, blue, or pink, there are few flourishes to the design outside of your choice of colour.
The only thing that really stands out is a small black-and-yellow stripe on either end. This is just a sticker though – which on the upside means you can peel it off if you’re not a fan, but unfortunately means it’s also likely to peel itself off with sufficient wear and tear.
There are two LEDs for power and charging, one button to turn the printer off and on, and that’s honestly about it. When you want to load paper to print, you simply slide the back of the body off and load in the prints – it’s simple, quick, and pretty difficult to get wrong.
App and features
- Easy to pair with free smartphone app
- Edit photos and create collages
- A little buggy
Almost everything you do with the Kodak Step is controlled through the free app, available on iOS or Android. You can set up an account with Kodak, but this is optional – everything works fine without one.
The first step is pairing the printer to the app, but this is easy enough. They connect over Bluetooth, and in less than a minute I had the app connected to the printer and ready to go.
Images can be selected from your device’s gallery, or you can connect the app to your Facebook, Instagram, or Google photo libraries for more options.
Once you pick an image, there’s a wealth of options. You can just print it as it, either in landscape or portrait format, with the option to either print the full image with a border or crop it in if it’s not in the exact aspect ratio of the Zink prints (most of your photos won’t be).
But you can also edit images. This can be as simple as applying an Instagram-style filter, or you can get more complex and tweak brightness, hue, or colour temperature, or add on colourful frames, stickers, text, or drawings. You can also create collages with multiple photos in one print – but bear in mind that due to the size of the paper, each image may end up pretty tiny.
I’ve mostly been impressed with the Kodak Step Prints app, which is well laid out – and far simpler to use than its strangely laborious step-by-step tutorial process would suggest.
That said, it’s not perfect. For one there are some odd choices, like the fact that the most detailed set of image hue sliders appear only on the ‘Print preview’ page of the app – and not, as you’d expect, in the ‘Edit photo’ section.
There are bugs to sort out too. The app has a tendency to freeze at times, especially when loading a photo to edit. The ‘Print preview’ brightness slider also seems to be entirely broken, raising brightness drastically if you so much as tap on the bar, with no option to lower it below the image’s starting point.
Print quality
- Small 2×3” Zink prints
- Sticky-backed
- Decent detail and colour
The Kodak Step prints onto ink-free Zink prints – a popular format for instant printers and cameras in recent years.
The key benefits to Zink are that the prints themselves are cheap and quick to process, the printer doesn’t need ink cartridges, and that each print is actually sticky-backed – so you can peel off the back layer and turn any photo print into a sticker.
There are two real downsides. One is size – at 2×3”, Zink prints are tiny. That’s part of why the printer itself is so portable of course, so it’s not all bad. But still, these are dinky, and too small to really display anywhere – they’re better suited to making collages or tucking into a wallet.
The bigger concern is quality. This isn’t bad by Zink standards, preserving a fair amount of detail from images and printing at a respectable colour range. Still, a little is lost from every photo, and there’s none of the charm or style you’ll find on an instant film printer like the Instax Mini Link .
Battery life
- Battery for up to 25 prints
- Charges via Micro-USB
On a full charge, the Kodak Step can apparently print up to 25 prints – I didn’t have that many to test with so can’t confirm, but it did happily make it through a full pack of Zink paper, with lots of standby time, without complaint.
The one small disappointment is that when it comes to charging, you have to use a Micro-USB cable. This is getting to be a pretty old charging standard now, and it’s plausible that you won’t really own or use any other Micro-USB products at this point.
Kodak does include a cable for you to plug into any existing USB charger, but still – it’s a bit annoying that this couldn’t use the more recent and universal USB-C standard.
Price and availability
Zink paper is relatively affordable too, though still costs around 50p/50c per sheet – less than Instax prints, but enough that you won’t want to burn through prints with abandon.
Make sure to check out our guide to the best instant printers to see how the competition stack up, or the best instant cameras if you want to take photos rather than just print them (many do both).
Verdict
The Kodak Step Printer is hardly a reinvention of the instant printer, but it’s a good example of the form.
It’s small, compact, and feels durable, with decent battery life and an easy print process. The associated app is simple too, with quick pairing and a range of options to alter your images – though I did encounter a couple of bugs and issues along the way.
Best of all, at the time of writing this runs a little cheaper than most of its rivals while doing fundamentally the same thing – enough to make it an easy option to recommend.
Best Prices Today: Kodak Step Instant Printer
Author: Dominic Preston, Contributor, Tech Advisor
Previously Tech Advisor’s Deputy Editor, Dom covers everything that runs on electricity, from phones and laptops to wearables, audio, gaming, smart home, and streaming.
Recent stories by Dominic Preston:
- Instax Square SQ40 review
- Kodak Step Instant Camera review
- Instax Square SQ1 review
