LOMO Kompakt Automat Camera
Ok, I am a bigger sucker for hype than most, so when the LOMO craze hit I was right there with all the other suckers ready to pony up the cash for one of these monsters as fast as I could, but in a twinge of cheapness I purchased mine online from a dubious source and managed to get it for the (insanely high) bargain price of $90. The Lomographic Society holds exclusive distribution rights and sells them for $150 artificially propping up the prices.
For those that don't know what a LOMO LCA is, it is just a crappy little Soviet/Russian compact 35mm camera with scale focusing and automatic exposure control. It also sports a 32mm lens which is slightly wider than most compact 35's.
So what's all the hype about? Apparently a couple of Austrian students stumbled onto the little camera in a shop while on vacation in Prague, bought a few and shot some drunken fun photos. When they got back to Vienna all their friends wanted one and from this they must have had a flash of genius and realized the marketing potential of the humble little snap-shooters. Anyway, they formed a "society," organized a few "international events" and came up with a sort of manifesto outlining a new photographic art form that revolved around owning and using the LOMO LCA (for a good discussion on the marketing of this camera see this excellent paper: Tribal Marketing).
Looking at the numbers, the Lomographic Society currently claims a membership of over 35,000 member and since a purchase is required for membership you can come up with a rough estimate of the potential profits that founders could have generated with this project. Based on the retail prices of other Ex-Soviet cameras it would be reasonable to assume that the lowly LOMO should wholesale for well under $20 a piece. If we conservatively assume marketing costs etc. raise the actual price of the camera to a whopping $50, the Lomographic Society should easily have netted 3.5 million dollars in pure profits (and I believe that it would have been much higher)! Damn, don't you wish you came up with this scam?!
In a nutshell, the whole point to Lomography is to get photos that are "so bad they're good" and you accomplish this with a LOMO by making sure the camera is shooting wide open and uses a long exposure to insure that your photos suffer vignetting, motion blur and poor focus, but you have to ask yourself, "Why do I need a LOMO to do that???" Truth be told, you don't, but you can't be part of the club unless you have paid the price and are using a genuine LOMO camera.
In my opinion cheaper and better choices for this "new" type of photography would be a used Olympus XA (XA-2 if you really want cheap and scale focusing) or a Minox GT-E (or older used model). If you want to stay "Russian" get a Kiev 35A. All these cameras will do everything that the LOMO LCA will and also take a "good photo" on those rare occasions that you actually want to do something that boring.
Well, as I said, I purchased one of these cameras and ran a couple rolls of film through it before selling it on eBay for $130 (wow, even I made a profit in this scam!). While the camera is nothing special, it really isn't that bad either. The ergonomics are decent and it is also an almost acceptable shooter as well. Below is a link to my one and only LOMO gallery: