Lomography regularly releases new cameras, but the release of its latest – the autofocus, 35mm LOMO MC-A – has come with little warning.
The camera, styled to look like high-end compact cameras from the decade before digital, looks completely different to the plastic-fantastic simple cameras that make up the bulk of its camera range.
Kosmo Foto has been promised an example to test which should hopefully be with us in a few weeks, but in the meantime we have a number of images of various parts of the camera included as part of Lomography’s official press kit.
The camera appears to be styled after some of the cult compacts released in the 1990s and early 2000s, bearing a slight (though boxier) resemblance to the Fujifilm Klasse series. The camera measures 125.8mm (w) × 69.5mm (h) × 42mm (d), a little bigger than many of the cameras in this class. It weighs 332g without the CR-2 battery needed to power it.
At the heart of the LOMO MC-A is its lens – a Minitar II 32mm f/2.8 lens inspired by the lens in the original Soviet-era LOMO LC-A. The lens has two focusing modes – autofocus, and manually selected zone focus, a nod to the original LOMO LC-A. It’s the first Lomography 35mm camera to feature autofocus.
The camera’s back features a film window to check if film is loaded (and which type). You can see the camera’s manual film advance on the top right corner.
The camera’s bottom plate features the battery compartment for the CR-2 battery needed, plus the rewind handle. The LOMO MC-A requires both manual film advance and rewinding.
Like every other modern compact, the LOMO MC-A has an integral flash. Like many other Lomography cameras released recently (such as the LomoApparat) the flash can be adapted with special coloured filters and masks.
The flash has a guide number of GN9 (and the default setting is off). It is an auto flash, with a first-curtain long-exposure programmatic flash mode. The flash has a range of 3.2 m (10.5ft)at ISO 100 at f/2.8, Lomography says.
As you can see from the shutter dial, the LOMO MC-A has both auto and manual shutter speeds – the manual speeds run the whole range from B to 1/500.
The exposure compensation dial allows you to change the exposure value +/- up to two stops.
There is a focus selection switch – both autofocus and manual focus, plus what appears to be a power-off switch.
The camera’s LCD screen shows the frame number, the focusing mode selected and battery level.
Below this are buttons for adjusting the flash mode, operating the self-timer and changing the camera’s ISO.
Should you want to shoot the LOMO MC-A in manual focusing mode, you have to choose the right focus zones. These zones use the same colour scheme as the original Soviet-era LOMO LC-A – a nice touch which harks back to the cult camera which started Lomography’s journey back in the early 1990s.
I'm a New Zealander who has been living in London since the mid-1990s, shooting film seriously since the year 2000. Kosmo Foto was launched in 2012 and has since become a film brand, with the release of my first films Kosmo Foto Mono 35mm (2017) and Kosmo Foto Mono 120 (2019).
I’m doing everything I can to promote film photography in the 21st Century, and help it survive and thrive. If you want to write something for Kosmo Foto, please drop me a line at foto.dowling@gmail.com.
Good to see Lomography get in on the higher end 35mm compact sector with this camera. By the look of it, they have got all the right bells and whistles in place to keep the community happy yet keep that retro feel of late 20th century alive and well.