The Fujifilm Instax Mini Link Smartphone Printer – Dusky Pink is a novelty product that capitalizes on the increasingly popular market trend of retroism, resurrecting the concept of theinstant camera and pairing it with smartphones to produce a pocket printer that uses your phone as its lens. Its surprisingly good print quality rivals some of the best printers available today!
Related: In case you are looking for a 3D printer, read the Formlabs Form 3 review
Why We Like It – Fujifilm Instax Mini Link Smartphone Printer – Dusky Pink
The Fujifilm Instax Mini Link Smartphone Printer – Dusky Pink is a compact photo printer with a nifty design, a tiny footprint, and solid print quality for what it is. It’s no substitute for a real printer, but it’s a neat novelty that brings back memories of older times.
- Very compact
- Print quality isn’t bad for product class
- Easy connection thanks to the Instax Mini Link App
- Only works with smartphones, PCs aren’t supported at all
Related: For those searching for a scanner, you may read the Fujitsu Fi 7160 review
Speed
Print speed is impressive on the Fujifilm Instax Mini Link Smartphone Printer, particularly for its size class. Prints take a mere 20 seconds, and unlike certain other pocket photo printers, quality isn’t sacrificed so long as the source image is good. It’s around twice as fast as the HP OfficeJet 200, which takes around 40 seconds to print a full-color image, though there’s one caveat with regards to Fujifilm’s impressive showing–the physical image size is absolutely tiny. It’s no surprise the print is quick when the image produced is physically small, but it’s still an impressive showing, especially when compared to other $99 pocket printers.
Print Quality
For its size class, print quality isn’t bad provided you’re feeding it decent-quality pictures. With that said, it’s immensely outclassed by products that don’t cost a whole lot more; the Canon Pixma iP110, for example, blows its image quality out of the water yet can commonly be had for around $150. This is also only a photo printer; it can’t print documents, and it can’t even print from a PC even when hard-wired to it. You have to use Fujifilm’s app, which is only available for smartphones.
Efficiency
Because it’s a small, niche device that uses a proprietary format to print–Instax Mini film–efficiency isn’t particularly impressive on the Fujifilm Instax Mini Link Smartphone Printer. As replacement rolls of film are, at the time of writing, $13.38 for a 20-pack of film, cost per page is a very high $1.5; this is way ahead of even the absolute worst of the worst proper printers in terms of efficiency, such as the Epson WorkForce WF-110; that pulls an astronomical 9 to 18 cents per page, and yet it’s still leaps and bounds below Fujifilm’s product in terms of running costs.
Advanced Features
There’s not much in the way of advanced features on the Fujifilm Instax Mini Link Smartphone Printer itself; there’s bluetooth support and that’s it. All of the features are crammed into the (mandatory) app, the Instax Mini Link App; it provides a range of features, modes, and filters you can engage and apply to your photos before you print to add extra flair to them. Image Print is what it says: it prints images. Collage Print prints off a collage of images, Video Print prints off a selected frame from a video on your smartphone, Fun Mode allows you to draw on the image and customize it before sending it off to print, and Party Print generates a collage by connecting multiple phones to the printer and having the device owners send a photo apiece to have it generate and print a collage. They’re all novel features, but they’re fun to mess around with.
Value
The Fujifilm Instax Mini Link Printer sits in a very weird boat when it comes to value. Compared to other cheap pocket printers from brands like Polaroid, Fujifilm nails it in the value department; print speed and print quality is vastly superior, and product quality isn’t sacrificed to cram in additional pointless features that add nothing of value due to being mediocre implementations of unnecessary additions. Compared to a real printer, though, the Fujifilm Instax Mini Link Smartphone Printer is a tough sell; it’s not much cheaper than some very fantastic budget printers, and its running costs are significantly higher. It’s also unusable for standard business use, as it’s meant for printing photos off and can’t interface with computers.
Fujifilm Instax Mini Link Smartphone Printer – Dusky Pink Wrap-up
The Fujifilm Instax Mini Link Smartphone Printer is a good buy for the right audience. If you want a printer meant for genuine printer use–printing documents and graphics from a computer–it’s a very poor pick. It can’t print from computers, it’s not intended to print text, its upkeep is extremely expensive, and its prints are of course small. If you just want a neat, novel item to print photos off from your phone, or you want to pick up a stocking stuffer or random novel gift for a friend or family member, you really can’t go wrong with it; the app provides a decent bit of features to tinker around with, and its print quality is very solid for what the printer is.
