The Lomography company are producing 1000s of Lomo camera everyday for scamming non professional photographers. They are selling it at the retail price of £239.99 but what you get is a cheap 35mm film camera which would nomally cost you under £5 and it would cost them about £1 to make.

Let me start with a little history about the original LOMO LCA camera. The Lomo LCA camera were produced by the old russia (USSR) back in the 70s. The idea behind this camera is a little bit special. The russian did not make the camera for profit. The idea was to produce a cheap but usable auto camera that is affordable for everyone lived in the comunist world. The camera body were made with cheap prastic. So at the time nearly every single russian family would have one Lomo camera. But this camera is not any good in term of picture quilty.

So now you might ask why people are so crazy about this camera nowadays. It is simply because this camera is so bad and it is not even worth it to produce such low quilty camera. In the early 90s few autrain student went to prague and they were in a budget they were looking for a cheap camera for some snap shoots diring their trip. The bought a Lomo LCA for around $10 and taken some photo and brought home with them. They developed the photo and found out that these camera can produce something very different from a normal camera (nothing can be as bad as that). They were clever students and decieded to go to go russia to buy out all the LOMO LCA which are fuctionable for a really cheap price since no one would want them anymore. After they bought 1000s of camera back and they started to advertise those cheap camera in europe and USA. Yes this camera is different from the others but in a very bad way in my point of view.

After all the original LOMO had been sold out they decided to make a deal with a chinese factory to produce very simalar product named the LOMO LCA+. The LCA+ is even worst than the original LCA since the lens is made by prastic rather than glass like the original ones. In the factory workers are being pay around £4 a day to produce these camera and that factory is capable to produce 10,000+ LOMO LCA+ in a single day.

The scam of LOMO LCA+ is still going on and I would like to askeveryone looking for a lomo to think again before making a purchase. The Original idea of LOMO is to prduce a camera where everyone can afford and enjoy not to make a huge profit. And nowadays they turn this idea around and scamming people money which I feel sick about it.

You can always get a 35mm disposible camera for around £3 and they do offer the exact effect as the LCA or LCA+ does. However if you are able to get yourself a copy of the orginal LCA which was made in USSR for a resonable price than I would say it is a great item of history and idealogy. (reasonable price = £30 or less)

Hope camera company will offer such camera for human kind these days. Perhaps canon can sell their 40D for £50 which is the price it would cost them to produce the camera.

Image via Wikipedia