The Fujifilm Instax Square SQ6 is an instant camera in Fujifilm’s extremely popular Instax line. Its mission is fun — photos of your crew at the football game, selfies with your partner, and snaps of your family good times. This camera is point-and-shoot simple: turn it on, frame in the viewfinder, press the button. With a click and a whir, a square photograph ejects out of the top of the camera. It develops in about 90 seconds.
Fujifilm has produced a dizzying array of Instax camera models. They all fall in one of three series: Mini, Square, and Wide. Each series makes small images of 1.8×2.4 inches, 2.4×2.4 inches, and 3.9×2.4 inches, respectively.
The Square SQ6 comes in five colors: gray, blue, red, white, and gold. There’s also a Taylor Swift Edition with her name plastered all over the front. I went with gold because that color was on sale.
The camera sets exposure automatically, but focus is fixed. There are two focal lengths, normal and close, which to my eye look more like wide and normal. I wasn’t able to find any information about the lens, such as aperture or those focal-length measurements. I’m sure Fujifilm thinks this camera’s normal user photographs so casually as not to care about such details.
The Square SQ6 offers several modes: selfie, macro, landscape, light (which adds a stop or two of exposure) and dark (which reduces exposure by a stop or two). Selfie and macro mode use the close focal length; all others use the normal focal length. There’s also a double-exposure mode which lets you press the shutter button twice before the camera ejects the photograph. The mode button is on the back; press it to cycle through the modes, which are arrayed across the camera’s back near the top. A small light glows over the mode you select.
The built-in flash defaults to always firing. You can turn it off by pressing the no-flash button on the camera’s back. The camera also comes with orange, purple, and green plastic filters that snap onto the flash, to cast your photo in colored light.
The Square SQ6 also includes a self timer. The button is on the back with the mode and no-flash buttons. Press it, then press the shutter button, and the shutter fires ten seconds later. There’s a tripod mount on the bottom of the camera so you can put yourself in group photos.
By the way, if you’re into instant photography, I’ve also reviewed a bunch of Polaroid cameras: the venerable SX-70 (here), the OneStep 600 (here), the One600 (here), the Colorpack II (here), and the Automatic 250 (here). Or check out all of my camera reviews here!
Instax Square photos are small, and sit comfortably in the palm of your hand. While the image area is 2.4×2.4 inches, the print itself is slightly larger at 2.8×3.4 inches. Polaroid SX-70/600/I-Type prints are noticeably larger, at 3.5×4.2 inches. I scanned the images in this review on my Canon CanoScan 9000F Mark II to 1,000 pixels on the long end. I’m displaying them in this review at 500 pixels on the long end. They look small on the screen, but when viewed on the Web it’s still larger than the print’s actual size.
Fujifilm produces a color and a black-and-white film for its Instax Square cameras. The color film is good and saturated, as you might expect from a photo system whose mission is to be a part of fun times with family and friends. This film especially loves blue.
I used Landscape mode for the photo above, which put the in-focus patch between 6 feet 7 inches and infinity. I used Normal mode for this photo, which put the in-focus patch between 1 foot 7 inches and 6 feet 7 inches.
The black-and-white film has a creamy look and a pleasing tonality, though shadow areas block up easily. I favor the black-and-white film and shoot it most often in this camera.
It’s a bit much that Fujifilm uses the term “macro” for the SQ6’s close-focusing mode since it lets you focus only from 12 to 20 inches. At that distance you get a lot of horizontal and vertical parallax error because of the viewfinder’s top-left placement. In this photo, I hadn’t figured out yet how much to offset the subject in the viewfinder.
It turns out that the O in the center of the viewfinder creates the top and right bounds for macro mode. Why Fujifilm didn’t use framing lines like every other camera in the history of cameras is beyond me. Even when I used the O to frame in macro mode, I still cut off some of my image on the right.
I rather liked selfie mode. There’s a little mirror on the front of the camera, right next to the lens. The idea is that you put your face in the mirror and press the button. But much like macro mode, selfie mode suffers from parallax. To get a photo with your face in the center of the photograph, put your face toward the left of the mirror.
I’m not a double exposure kind of guy, but I tried double exposure mode anyway to see how it worked. Here’s a picture of our garish loveseat in front of the living room window plus a bathroom mirror selfie. Yawn. But as you can see, this mode works.
The viewfinder is the SQ6’s fatal flaw. It’s just so inaccurate, which makes it hard to get a photograph that matches what you frame. When I made this photograph, the house filled the viewfinder. I also forgot to turn on Landscape mode so it would be more in focus.
I used the Square SQ6 to photograph my family’s Christmas celebration. Perhaps I should have chosen color film for it, but I had one pack of Monochrome left and that’s what I shot. I found that when I filled the viewfinder with the person I was photographing, I got images like this, with lots of surrounding context. How frustrating. Why can’t what I see in the viewfinder reasonably represent the image I’m making?
To see more photos from this camera, check out my Fujifilm Instax Square SQ6 gallery.
The Fujifilm Instax Square SQ6 is a fun camera for making snapshots of family and friends. It’s tricky to use this camera for anything else. The Square SQ6 just isn’t a great camera for the kinds of subjects I usually photograph. The film is pretty good for instant film, but you’ll never mistake it for Tri-X or Portra. The viewfinder’s top-left placement creates parallax that takes skill and luck to overcome, and is this camera’s fatal flaw.
Even though I’ve owned a few hundred film cameras in my lifetime, only a handful of them were brand new when I got them. Of them, only this one was still available for sale new at the time I wrote a review of it.
But if you want one, act fast: Fujifilm might have discontinued this camera, as it’s no longer listed on the official Instax site. You can still buy them here and there, but probably only out of available stock. Once that dries up, you’ll have to turn to the used market to get a Square SQ6.
If you like old film cameras, check out all of my reviews here!
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