Disposable cameras, or just your guests' phones?

Where does a disposable camera really win?

In the not looking back. That sounds like a shortcoming and it is the entire reason people buy them. On a phone somebody takes a photo, looks at it, decides they look terrible and takes three more. What you end up with is the fourth: the version in which everybody knows there is a camera. A disposable camera has no little screen, so there is no second attempt either. You get the first moment, and that is almost always the real one.

And then the picture itself. ISO 800 film with a hard flash on it gives grain, blown out faces and a black background, and that does not look like a photo from this year. There is a distance in it you cannot imitate with a filter, because it is not an effect, it is the device.

The third is the most underrated: it is an object. There is something lying on the table that people pick up. Guests who do not know each other pass it along, and that is a conversation which would not otherwise happen. A QR code on a card is an instruction, a little camera is a toy.

If you read all that and think it is worth it, then it probably is. What follows is not meant to talk you out of it, but to let you know what you are buying.

What does it cost if you work it out?

Take ten tables, so ten cameras. At HEMA a disposable camera with flash costs €17.99 and holds 27 frames, so you are €179.90 down before a single photo has been taken. Developing with prints and digital files costs €14.99 per camera there, so add €149.90. Together €329.80 for at most 270 frames, which comes out at €1.22 per photo taken if not one of them fails.

It can be cheaper. At fotorolletjeontwikkelen.nl developing alone costs €6.95, and developing with scans €16.95 for the standard scan up to €23.95 for the large one. They say you can usually download the digital photos within one to two working days, against twelve to fourteen working days at HEMA. So that mainly saves time and not so much money.

Then the 270. That is a ceiling you will not reach. A Kodak FunSaver has a flash range of 1.2 to 3 metres, and that is the whole evening in one line: the face across the table works, the dance floor at six metres is black. On top of that come the classics: a thumb over the lens, a camera that disappears into a bag halfway through, and table four shooting the rest of the roll on one group photo after the main course. How many exactly fail we do not know, and anybody who gives you a percentage does not know either. What you do know is the direction.

What are you actually after in that disposable camera?

Put the question the other way round. If you knew for certain that you would see your guests' photos on Sunday afternoon, in one go, all at the same time, would you still buy disposable cameras? For most people the answer is no, and that gives away what they were really after. Not the grain and not the paper, but the surprise. The not knowing what is on there.

You can have that surprise from photos that came out as well. You close the album: guests upload all evening and see nothing, and at the moment you choose everything opens at once. The same not knowing, the same morning after, only without the black dance floor shots and without the three weeks. How to keep an album closed until after the wedding is written up as a separate guide, including what to put on the card.

And what you do not get from the grain: you do not get that back, full stop. If the look of the picture is what you are in it for, and not the surprise, then a disposable camera is the right choice and you should simply buy one. Put one on the tables where people already know each other, then, and not ten across the whole room.