Speaking of selfies, now giving the lens barrel an extra pull extends the lens ready for close-up shooting. It's a much simpler system than the Mini 9's easily forgotten clip-on attachment, though you have to grip the lens barrel awkwardly to close it up again, otherwise you end up turning the camera off completely.

The in-built selfie-mode is also a huge improvement over the Mini 11’s predecessors. Instant cameras like these really lend themselves to taking group shots with friends and self-portraits. Having a close focus option right at hand – and a handy front-facing mirror makes selfies a breeze. Instax film tends to produce pastel-like colors and soft-focus details, giving your photos that unmistakable instant feel, though they tend to be more true-to-life than rivals including Polaroid or Lomography. Those can appear far more dream-like, while Instax appears more natural. Darker scenes and shadows appear much more dramatic than real life, though.

Constant firing flash (automatic light adjustment), recycle time: 6.5 seconds or less (when using new batteries), effective flash range: 0.3 to 2.7 m With no need to manually adjust the exposure settings every time the lighting situation changes, the Fujifilm Instax Mini 11 has a much greater hit-rate when it comes to correctly judging a scene than the Mini 9, although the nature of Instax film means overblown highlights are still common. Nobody is going to claim their creative goal is natural looking results when using an instant camera. The minute and a half wait for ‘instant’ delivery is the selling point here – with photographic quality coming second. Indeed, the typically either under-or-over-exposed look of an instant print, the marginally out-of-focus results (0.3 metres is the closest you can get to a subject) and the fact that a lot of the time the photographer won’t have got things 100% perfectly framed is a large part of instant cameras’ naïve charm. There's no way to disable the flash, no self timer, and no tripod thread on the bottom. This is about as simple as instant cameras get. Push the lens barrel release and it extrudes using a spring mechanism, with the built-in flash activating automatically.

It's an issue we've seen in other instant cameras, though, so it's more of a learning curve for the photographer than a failing of the camera. It's because the auto exposure system can now vary the shutter speed between 1/2 and 1/250, so it should be able to capture the right amount of light in all shooting scenarios. This is a big step up from the Mini 9's fixed 1/60 shutter speed, and helps massively when shooting indoors. The fixed focus lens manages to keep the majority of portrait and middle distance shots looking crisp, while landscapes can appear softer and more dreamlike.

The print in question is ejected from the top of the camera almost as soon as the flash has fired – and here it always fires, even in strong sunlight, as there appears to be no way to disable it, as we occasionally can on higher end instant models. Science has found that the instant print doesn’t develop any faster if you ‘shake it like a Polaroid picture’, so we have to wait the typical 90 seconds for the finished result. Incidentally, the Instax Mini 11’s effective flash range is up to a very fair 2.7 metres, with a 6.5 second wait between flashes. To be honest, an instant camera isn’t one for rapid-fire use, so that sort of delay is scarcely going to be an issue.