Watch out, Fujifilm! Insta360 is going after Instax with a new instant camera kit

If you're an Insta360 user, your humble little action camera will soon become an instant camera able to produce instant photographs.

The company has dropped a teaser video for a new camera kit, which will equip the Insta360 Ace Pro 2 with a proper grip, exposure dial, shutter button and (zoom?) rocker switch, along with a printer module that spits out your pictures as you take them.

This isn't Insta360's first such add-on for the Ace Pro 2, of course. The new (and as yet unnamed) kit comes in the wake of the Xplorer Grip Kit launched earlier this year, which added a grip and a (very strange, seesaw-like) shutter button to the action cam.

However, while it was well received, the Xplorer felt very much like a proof of concept next to what Insta360 is doing with the upcoming kit.

As you can see in the video below, the grip has been completely redesigned with the addition of a knurled control dial and an actual, proper shutter button – which will go a step further in establishing the Ace Pro 2 as an action cam that can cosplay as a street photography camera.

However, it's the instant printer component that's the really interesting part of the equation – meaning that the Ace Pro 2 can also drag up as an instant camera, putting it squarely in the same arena as Instax and Polaroid.

With Instax having sold 100 million cameras as of this year, and parent company Fujifilm recently posting a 13.3% revenue spike thanks largely to Instax sales, it's clear that the market is a profitable one – because once you've sold something that prints pictures, you can then sell paper on which to print them.

It seems incredibly unlikely that Instax or Polaroid would license their tech to Insta360, so we could be looking at a proprietary printing format when it comes to the new Ace Pro 2 kit.

More likely, it will adopt the popular Zink printing technology used by portable printers as well as digital instant cameras from Canon, Kodak and Polaroid. Either way, I would expect this to be an "only print the ones you want" experience (similar to the recent Instax Mini LiPlay+) rather than an "every shutter press prints a photo" experience like a traditional instant camera.

Whatever is in store, we won't have to wait long to find out the specifics. The teaser video confirms that the announcement will take place on November 12 (though I'd expect details to leak on Chinese social media long before then).

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