Are disposable cameras at a wedding worth it?

Yes — if you want them for what they are, which is a party game that happens to produce some photographs. No, if you are hoping they will be the record of the night. The couples who are disappointed by table cameras are almost always the second kind, and the gap between the two is mostly arithmetic.

We have a reason to care about this. We send guests off with a camcorder for the same instinct that puts a camera on every table — the best angle on a wedding usually belongs to a guest — so we have spent a lot of time looking at what guests actually bring back.

The arithmetic nobody does first

A single-use camera usually holds 27 exposures. Ten tables, one camera each, is 270 frames if every roll is finished — and they are not all finished. Say a third of what does get shot is a photograph you would keep. That is a real number of lovely pictures, and it is also rather fewer than the size of the box suggests.

Then add the cost. Cameras and developing are two separate bills, and developing with scans is often close to the price of the camera again, per roll. Prices move and vary by lab, so work it out for the labs near you — but put the per-keeper figure next to what a friend with a phone costs, which is nothing.

Why so many come back blank or black

• The flash reaches a few metres and no further. Anything beyond it — the dance floor from a table, the speeches from the back — comes out as a black frame with a bright face in the foreground, or just black.
• The lens is fixed-focus and does not do close-ups. Guests hold it at selfie distance and get a soft blur; about an arm’s length and a bit is where it starts working.
• Fingers. A small plastic body held by someone who has had three glasses of wine puts a thumb over the corner of a surprising number of frames.
• The roll is never finished. A camera with nine shots left gets left on a table, swept up with the centrepieces, or taken home by a guest who meant to give it back.
• Children find them first. Some of the best frames in any batch come from a six-year-old, and so do forty photographs of the tablecloth.

How to make them actually work

1. Give them to people, not tables. A camera assigned to one named friend at each table gets finished and gets returned. A camera that belongs to the table belongs to nobody.
2. Tell them what to shoot. One card: people close up, faces lit by the flash, nothing across the room. Our own shot list for guests is written for video, but the rule about getting closer than feels polite is the same.
3. Use them where the flash works. Tables, the photo corner, the bar, anywhere people are a metre or two apart. Not the dance floor, not the speeches from a seat.
4. Collect them before the end of the night. A box at the exit, and one person whose job it is. Cameras left to the morning are cameras you do not get back.
5. Develop at a lab that returns scans and the negatives. The scans are what you share; the negatives are what you keep.

When they are the right call

• You want the look. Flash on film at night has a texture a phone cannot quite fake, and some couples want an album that looks like the nineties. That is a perfectly good reason, and nothing else produces it.
• The wedding is small. Twenty guests and five cameras is a well-covered room, and everyone knows everyone.
• You want something for people to do. Guests genuinely enjoy them, especially the ones who would never take their phone out.

What to pair them with

Treat table cameras as a bonus and make sure something else is doing the real work. The phones in your guests’ pockets already take better photographs in the dark — the hard part is getting everything off those phones afterwards without the quality being stripped out on the way. And for moving pictures and voices, which film cameras cannot do at all, there is what happens when you hand your guests a camcorder — the same idea, with sound, and with an editor at the end of it.