Every instant film and print format, compared on cost

The full table

The headline: a seven-fold spread

The cheapest printed photograph here is about 39 cents and the most expensive about $2.75. That is a seven-fold range, and it is almost entirely explained by three things: how big the print is, how many come in a pack, and whether it is chemical film or a printed photograph.

Those figures round up to whole packs, because you cannot buy half a pack — which is why the Kodak 4 x 6 figure (80-print cartridges) looks worse than its per-print cost suggests at exactly 100 prints.

Why printed photographs beat instant film on cost

1. 1.Pack size. Printer media comes in units of 60 to 108. Instant film comes in 8, 16 or 20. Buying in bigger units is most of the saving.
2. 2.No chemistry. An instant film sheet contains the developing chemicals for its own photograph. A dye-sub sheet is paper and a share of a ribbon.
3. 3.You choose what to print. On a camera, every shutter press costs the same whether or not anybody had their eyes open. On a printer you only pay for photographs you already decided were worth it — which, at a realistic keeper rate, roughly halves the effective cost again.

That third point is the one most comparisons miss, and it means the real gap is wider than the table shows. At a 50% keeper rate, instax mini is effectively $1.70 per photograph you wanted, against 39 cents for a Canon print you chose.

Cost per square inch, for the pedantic

Per-shot cost rewards small prints, which is a bit unfair to the big formats. Here is the same data normalized by picture area:

On this measure the Polaroid Go, which looks mid-priced per shot, is the most expensive format on the site — you are paying $1.37 for a 3.4 square inch picture. And a 4 x 6 printer print is about 25 times better value per square inch than it.

What to take from this

• •If you want the most photographs for your money: a 4 x 6 dye-sublimation printer. Nothing else is close.
• •If you want instant film specifically: instax mini, at 85 cents. Everything else in the film category costs more for a comparable or smaller print.
• •If you want the Polaroid print: it is the most expensive photograph here and that is the deal. The print is genuinely different; go in knowing the figure.
• •If you want stickers: ZINK, at 60 cents, and the cost is not the point.
• •If you want to waste the least: a hybrid camera or a printer, because choosing what to print is a bigger saving than any format difference.