Your camera does 1080p video as effortlessly as The Rock benching a hundred pounds. Somehow, though, you don’t feel satisfied with the results. After weeks of pondering the matter, you realize you like your videos grainy, jittery and in old-school analog format. Maybe you need a Lomokino.
Made by Lomography, the camera is a throwback to the ancient days of Charlie Chaplin silent movies. And not just in the qualities of the movies you shoot. Like video capture devices of old, you’ll have to keep turning a crank in order to keep the thing recording. Yikes.
The Lomokino is a 35mm fixed-focus movie camera that’s compatible with any type of 35mm film, giving you plenty of room to mess around creatively. It captures a 24 x 8.5 mm exposure area with a 54-degree angle of view at an approximate frame rate of 3 to 5 frames per second (depending on how fast you advance the manual crank). A standard roll of film should have 144 frames, netting you around a minute or less of footage. Shots are framed using a top-mounted optical viewfinder.
Features include dynamic aperture settings (you can change it while shooting), a close-up button (for shots up to 0.6m), a hot shoe compatible with Lomography flash guns, and a volume display showing how much film is left. Since you’re going retro, everything requires more work, of course — you’ll have to get the film processed before watching your clips and watch it through a separate LomoKinoScope (where you’ll also have to use a hand-crank to get the film rolling).
You can get the Lomokino from the Lomography website, priced at $79. It’s also available in a package that includes the Lomokinoscope for $99.