Review: Lomography Lomo'Instant Wide Glass

Fujifilm's Instax cameras and printers have kept instant film alive in our digital world, but it isn't just Fujifilm making Instax cameras, in fact, some of the best instant cameras you can buy come from Lomography, like the company's new Lomo'Instant Wide Glass.

As the name suggests, the Lomo'Instax Wide Glass shoots Instax wide prints and has a glass lens. At $279, it's not cheap, but the quality of images coming out of this camera is the best I've seen in any Instax camera I've tested.

Glass Completely Full

Lomography has long made the Lomo'Instax Wide film, which, like Fujifilm's recently updated Instax Wide 400, prints Instax wide images shot through a plastic lens. Plastic lenses are the norm in Instax cameras. Sticking with plastic keeps the camera in the more palatable sub-$150 range. Plastic lenses like the one in Fujifilm's popular Mini 12 are fine for most casual, snapshot scenarios. I own two plastic-lens Instax cameras and am perfectly happy with them most of the time.

That said, glass lenses produce unquestionably better results, which is where the Lomo'Instant Wide Glass comes in. The images I made with this camera are far and away the best I've made with any Instax camera. They're sharper and have better, more accurate color rendition.

The first thing to know about the Lomo'Instant Wide Glass is that it's a big camera—7.3 inches wide and 4.6 inches high and deep. It looks and handles like some 6x9 film cameras I've used in the past (Fujifilm's GW series cameras come to mind), which makes sense because the film area of an Instax wide print is pretty close to a 6x9 negative. It's tough to get around the laws of physics. The good news is that while it's a tad bulky, the Glass isn't unwieldy and would feel right at home as an extra camera during a studio portrait shoot, which seems to be where Lomography is positioning it.

A good portion of the weight (1.6 pounds total) is the 90 mm multicoated glass lens on the front (for reference, Fujifilm's Wide 400 uses a 95 mm lens). Manual control on this camera is interesting—not fully manual, but with quite a few options nonetheless. For focusing there are zone options of 0.3, 0.6, and 1 to 2 meters, along with infinity. That gives you a few close-up options (there are parallax markers in the viewfinder to help with composition here). I like all the different options because this lens is good enough to do close-up work and produce good results.

The lens has threads and can take 52 mm filters. Lomography includes a Remote Control Lens Cap, the company's Splitzer filter (used in conjunction with Multiple Exposure mode), and some colored gels.

There are two f-stops available—f/8 and f/22. These are paired with shutter speeds ranging from eight seconds to 1/250s, but there's also a bulb mode, auto mode, and f/22 mode. I primarily shot outdoor landscapes so I heavily used the latter heavily to get as much in focus as possible. There's also an exposure compensation option: +1 EV or –1 EV. I found this helpful in full sunlight as Instax prints tend to wash out the sky, and I used +1 EV to open up shadows in darker scenes.

In Good Time

Shooting with the Wide Glass was enjoyable, though it is a big camera. Unlike most Instax cameras I've tested, this is not a snapshot camera. It benefits from slowing down and taking your time to get your exposure options dialed in. It also takes a little while to learn the quirks of the exposure meter. I shot through two rolls of film before I felt like I could get the results I was aiming for, and even then, at the end of the day, there are limits to Instax film's exposure latitude that no amount of exposure settings or experience can overcome.

I felt like when I ended up with shots that didn't work, the fault was usually either mine or the limits of the film. The Wide Glass has enough exposure and focusing options to get you to the point that you're pushing up against the limits of the medium and that's impressive.

The only thing that might give you a slightly better image is something like the Hasselback, which lets your $8,000-plus Hasselblad make Instax prints (or the Nons Instant Back, which does the same for square Instax film). I have not tested either nor do I have a Hasselblad lying around. For us mortals, the Lomo'Instant Wide Glass is the best Instax Wide camera on the market. If you love Instax to the point that you've considered putting real lenses on them, this is the camera for you.