Instant camera or photo printer?

#	Product	Best for	Cost per shot	Price
1	Kodak Mini 2 RetroThe cheapest running cost of any pocket printer, at about 42 cents a print.	Best printer for most people	$0.42	Check price
2	Fujifilm instax mini 12The moment, in your hand, in ninety seconds — for 85 cents.	Best camera for most people	$0.85	Check price
3	Fujifilm instax mini EvoA camera that shoots digitally onto real instax film — and prints from a phone too.	Best of both	$0.85	Check price

The one question that decides it

Does this person already take photographs on their phone, and are there thousands of them?

If yes, buy a printer. They do not need another way to take pictures — they need a way to get the ones they already have onto paper. That is the single most common mistake in this category: giving someone a camera when their actual problem is that four years of photographs exist only in a phone.

If no — if what you want is for them to have a thing that makes a photograph appear at a party — buy the camera. No printer reproduces that.

The cost difference is larger than people expect

A Canon SELPHY 4 x 6 print is about 39 cents and a Kodak 4PASS print about 42 cents. The cheapest instant film is 85 cents and Polaroid i-Type is about $2.37. So a printer is somewhere between twice and six times cheaper per picture — and the 4 x 6 print is much larger than any instant print except a full-size Polaroid.

There is a second saving that does not appear in that table: you only print photographs worth printing. On an instant camera every frame costs the same whether or not anyone had their eyes open.

Decision table

What a printer is worse at, honestly

• •There is no moment. Nobody gathers round to watch a print emerge from a Bluetooth printer. This is the whole gap, and it is not small.
• •It depends on an app. Every pocket printer needs a phone app, and the app is where the frustration lives — pairing, permissions, updates. A camera has none of that.
• •It is not a gift object in the same way. A camera is a thing. A printer is an accessory, and unwrapping one is less exciting even when it is the more useful purchase.
• •It needs charging. Most printers are rechargeable, and a flat printer at a party is useless in a way a flat AA camera is not.

What a camera is worse at

• •Every frame costs the same. Blinking, blurred, badly framed — 85 cents regardless.
• •One copy only. Unless you scan the print, there is no backup. A lost photograph is gone.
• •The pictures are not good. Fixed-focus lenses and flash-dependent exposure lose to any modern phone comfortably.
• •It has to be carried. A camera left at home takes no photographs, where a printer at home still prints everything from the trip.

The hybrid answer

If this is genuinely a close call, the instax mini Evo is the honest recommendation: it shoots digitally with a screen, prints only the frames you choose onto real instax mini film, and also accepts photographs from a phone over Bluetooth. It is both products in one, and the only compromise is price.

The Kodak Mini Shot models do the same job from the other direction — camera plus printer in one body, at about 42 cents a print rather than 85, with a dye-sublimation print instead of film.