LEGO CAMERA TEST
This fun set looks fantastic on your shelf – if only it took pictures. Amy Davies tries out the LEGO Polaroid OneStep SX-70 camera
If you’re anything like many of the photographers that I know, you’ll have plenty of cameras that sit on a shelf purely for aesthetic purposes and that never actually get used for anything. Lots of people these days – rightly or wrongly – have old film cameras gathering dust on said shelves purely for the look, which never actually do what they were intended to do.
With that in mind, it makes perfect sense to just cut out the middle part and have an ornament on your shelf that looks – certainly from a distance – like the real thing, but is in fact anything but. When it’s made out of LEGO you also have the added bonus of the time well-spent putting it together.
Step forward the LEGO Polaroid OneStep SX-70 Camera. This is one of two LEGO cameras launched in January 2024, the other being the Retro Camera 3-in-1 build. This also has plenty of old school vibes but is considerably cheaper, so is also worth considering (if you’re like me, you’ll end up with both).
The Polaroid set is designated as one of LEGO’s ‘18+’ sets, with its primary audience being adults. This is also reflected in the price point, which at £69.99 is not super cheap and is likely to appeal mostly to camera and photography aficionados who also occupy the central space of the Venn diagram with LEGO enthusiasts (where I sit firmly).
That price also reflects the fact that this isn’t simply a model of the OneStep. It also comes with a set of plastic ‘prints’, which can be ejected from the camera by pressing the shutter button. It’s a 516-piece kit with a complicated mechanism inside.
This is an “IDEAS” set, which means that the original idea came from a fan, rather than a LEGO employee.
Ideas can be voted on by the public and those which are popular can be properly designed and put into production. The Polaroid OneStep SX-70 was posted on the Ideas page in early 2022, reaching the magic 10,000 in less than two months and being approved by LEGO in the same year. Looking at the finished build next to the original idea reveals that it’s very similar – as you would expect as it’s essentially aiming to emulate, as closely as possible, a real object.
It has been designed by Marc Corfmat (known as Minibrick Productions), who, as we learn from the included instruction manual, is a mechanical engineering student. I’m a reasonably experienced LEGO builder, but I tried to approach this set as if I was picking it up for the first time, perhaps since childhood. If I had to guess, a lot of our readers may be tempted in by this set having not put together a set for some
