Instax or Polaroid for a wedding guest table: which one will not eat the budget? Cameras

Instax on cost grounds and it is not close. Mini film in twin packs works out somewhere around sixty to ninety cents a frame, while Polaroid i-Type in eight-shot packs lands closer to a dollar fifty to two twenty-five. At ninety guests and an expected two frames each you are looking at roughly one hundred and eighty frames, which is a very different bill depending on which way you go. Polaroid gives you a bigger, more beautiful object and slower, less predictable development, which at a party means people walking off with a print that has not finished.

Buy more film than you think and expect waste. Rule of thumb from doing this twice: about two frames per guest, plus a quarter on top for the ones taken of the ceiling, the floor, and someone's thumb. So for ninety guests I would buy around two hundred and twenty frames. Anything left over gets used in the following month, which is not true of most party purchases.

Two things that matter more than the format. First, the built-in flash on these has a short useful range, so put a sign on the table telling people to stand close, or you will get ninety underexposed prints of a dark room. Second, put a pen that writes on glossy film next to the guestbook, because normal biros skate off the print and people give up.

Nominate somebody who is not you to own the table. Batteries, film reloading, telling people to stand closer. Every one of these I have seen work had a person attached to it and every one that failed was left to sort itself out.

Went to a wedding that did this with a wide-format instant camera instead of the mini, and the difference in how it felt was significant. Bigger print, more room to write, and people treated it as an object rather than a sticker. It cost more per frame and there were fewer of them, and honestly the guestbook is better for it.