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Styled kind of like an old Kodak Brownie, Lomography’s first-ever video camera, the Lomokino, shoots video on ordinary rolls of 35mm film with a little crank of a handle. Capable of squeezing up to 50 seconds of footage onto a standard 36-frame roll, the finished results are a real throw back to ye olden days.
Given it’s a Lomography product, it’s a fun little device that’s the perfect thing to toss in your bag for slightly off-beat videos. Available by itself for £65, or with a LomoKinoScope (sort of like a Viewmaster, which you insert the negatives into) for £89, it’s on sale now.
Over to the tech details, and the Lomokino has a 25mm lens with 1/100 shutter speed. Aperture can be controlled manually by sliding a switch on the front between f/5.6 – f/11, and to focus there’s a button on the side for those 0.6m close-ups (otherwise, the standard focus is 1m – infinity).
On top, there’s a hotshoe adaptor for plugging flashes into (a Fritz the Blitz flash, at £55, and £9.90 adapter kit works best as the flash can be shot simultaneously while cranking the exposure handle), and there’s also a tripod mount if the Paul Greengrass effect isn’t desired.
To process the roll once finished, it can be taken to any processing lab (as long as you explain that the negatives shouldn’t be cut), but I’d suggest using one of Lomography’s LomoLabs (which you can also use through the mail, if there’s not one near you). Movie-editing software is needed to stitch the 144 images together; something like iMovie; Windows Movie Maker or Final Cut is perfect. Read up on the post-production notes over here, for more. From there, Lomography’s recommending Vimeo as the best place to upload your vids to, but if you prefer relegating them to the depths of some hidden folder on your PC, that’s ok too.
I’ve had the good fortune to have played around with one for the last week, so expect my review tomorrow, film fans. Otherwise check out an explainer video on the Lomokino, below, and an example of the film footage you can expect, at the very bottom of this post. [Lomokino]
Queensbury Rules: The Thoroughly Spiffing LomoKino! from Lomography on Vimeo.
Teaser 1 -Shop detail page from Lomography on Vimeo.
I can see this being a huge hit with the instagram toting hipsters. Now dickwads who think that adding filters to dull pictures makes them a photographer can think that using a deliberately low quality, retro camera makes them a cinematographer.
Eh, I guess that makes me a hipster — I love Lomography’s products.
If youre typing this on your mac from inside a starbucks, wearing black rimmed glasses after cycling in on your single speed. Maybe you’re a hipster. You use android though. So everything else is moot. Not a hipster
I am typing this on a Mac, but not inside a Starbucks. And my glasses are brown, not black
Plus, there’s no fixie bike in sight, I promise you!
Of course I don’t think your a hipster Kat, I wouldn’t talk to you or visit your site if I did. I am not saying that if you use this you are a hipster, just that those vacuum centred half-people will believe that it confers upon them magical artistic powers.
You clearly have money to burn, then. I love retro-photography and movie-making, but I’ve never purchased anything from Lomo – the prices they charge are insane. This is a really, really ridiculously overpriced product that is going to produce crappy results and is designed to tie people in to buying Lomo’s stupidly-overpriced films and developing services.
Avoid. Please. For the love of God, avoid.
Meh.
There’s a wealth of Super-8 cameras out there for next to nothing that will give far better results.
I would actually like to try this on the beach when im doing some kitesurfing photography. There is a plethora of cheesy, over budget, badly edited kiting videos which try this sort of effect.
Must fit this into muh budget somewhere just for messing about.
35mm film “video” sure… very funny, I’m sure this is suppose to be clever and puny. Let’s see how many people come to complain and state the obvious:
film is not video
this has no sound
it is not digital
dude it is like totally linear
omg how does iMovie import this format?
what are you drinking / smokin / pillin / shootin?
is it 3D?
This would be fund to use, but really, you can buy a super8 camera and shoot stuff that would blow your mind. Just log into Vimeo and check out the super8 stuff over there. Heck, i shoot super8 all the time.
Don’t get me started.
This is yet another pile of overpriced trash from Lomo – £89 for camera and viewer?!? For that, you can get a Super 8 camera, a projector and a few rolls of film that will massively outperform this ridiculous product.
Lomokino produces non-standard output that will be ridiculously difficult and expensive to work with. Send off a Super 8 cart for processing, and you get a 3-minute roll of film back that you can project and edit really easily – once you’ve seen Super 8 in a dark room in all its eye-popping glory, you’ll wonder where it’s been all your life.
Like all Lomo products, just steer clear, and buy yourself some proper vintage equipment, or buy from other vendors at a fraction of the price.