By Stephen Dowling
The 1970s brought many innovations into the film photography market: aperture-priority SLRs; the first digital cameras; auto focus compact cameras.
To that list, add another – 110 film. The disco era’s equivalent of APS, 110 film was the brainchild of Kodak in 1972, an attempt to simplify the sometimes fiddly loading of 35mm cameras for those who used a camera only occasionally.
They turned to the miniature 16mm film and encased it in a plastic cartridge that absolutely, positive eliminated loading errors. You just flipped open the back, dropped the cartridge in, closed the back and snapped away.
It was, of course, a compromise of convenience. A frame of 16mm film is significantly smaller than a frame of 35mm film, meaning it has to be enlarged much more for standard print formats. The film’s size meant camera makers were largely loathe to spend huge amounts creating high-end cameras for the format (Pentax’s Auto 110 and Minolta’s Zoom 110 SLR are the outliers.) The vast majority of 110 cameras were aimed at beginners and predominantly short of features; cameras for holidaymakers whose interest in photographey rarely lasted beyond their sunburn.
The major film companies started turning their back on 110 film in the 2000s; the fact that it lasted so long in production is perhaps testament to the many millions of 110 cameras produced in the last quarter of the 20th Century. Fujifilm’s last rolls of 110 film were produced in 2009 and Kodak’s a few years later. It could have been – for more than a decade now – an essentially dead format were it not for one last, committed producer: Lomography.
Lomographers didn’t think like most photographers: where others abandoned a film format for its faults and its foibles, Lomographers embraced it. Along with the LOMO LC-As, Smenas, Dianas and Holgas, some Lomographers experimented with 110 film, a toy-like format for photographers who weren’t afraid of grain and fuzzy definition.
In 2012, while the film giants were still culling popular films, Lomography brought 110 back into its roster of films. Cameras for the resurrected films followed, including the the Fisheye Baby 110 and a version of the cult Diana camera.
Lomography’s 110 film range has only increased over the past decade. It now boasts version of the Turqoise and Purple films, and most recently the LomoChrome ’92 colour film. It also includes two 110-only emulsions – the black-and-white Orca, and the colour negative Tiger film.
With Lomography now being the only film producer making 110 film, it announced a surprise new camera earlier this year: a new 110 camera considerably more sophisticated than the others it so far produced.
The Lomomatic 110, released in February, looks like a chunkier version of a higher-end 110 camera from the 1970s, like the Voigtlander Vitoret 110 EL, designed for Rollei by the visionary Heinz Waaske. It’s a viewfinder camera with an automatic exposure system and zone focusing – just like the famous LOMO LC-A. Lomography released two versions of the camera; a silver metallic version reminiscent of chrome cameras of years past, and a “Golden Gate” edition in orange and cream plastic.
Both cameras come with a matching flash module which can be attached to the side, aswell as tiny gels which alter the colour of the attached flash.
Lomography gave me a heads up on the camera so I could write a news story for the day of release. I don’t mind admitting that 110 was a format that had left me entirely indifferent over my three decades shooting film. I see a lot of them sorting through auction lots and eBay listings for Cameraburo; most of them seem pretty limited, and the film format way too small for serious photography. (This is not to throw any shade on anyone who does enjoy 110 photography – we each gravitate towards the formats we enjoy the most.)
But even just viewing the press release and the product photos, this camera intrigued me. The Lomomatic 110 seemed to have taken all the best elements of the LOMO LC-A – a camera I’d put in Top 10 of all time – and reimagined it for a completely different format. After years of Lomography essentially releasing the same simple 35mm camera (one shutter speed and B, and a couple of apertures if you’re lucky) in a succession of different body shapes, it was encouraging to see them thinking outside the box a little more.
A few months after release (which appears to have been pretty successful from the reviews and social media chatter) Lomography UK sent a silver example on extended loan. Over the following weeks – amid a busy day job, Cameraburo pop-ups and also testing the Pentax 17 – I was able to shoot six films on it.
The Lomomatic 110 is, it has to be said, much fatter and chunkier than most 110 cameras you’ll find – even the metal models from the 1970s. It gets even chunkier once you add the flash module.
According to Lomography, the camera’s specs are as follows:
Focal length: 23mm
Available apertures: f2.8, f5.6
Shutter speeds: Auto (A) 30s to 1/250, Bulb (B) up to 30s
ISO Settings: 100, 200, 400
Multiple exposure: Yes
Tripod mount: No
Cable release: No
Battery: 1 x CR2
The ISO 400 maximum might seem limiting, but good luck finding any 110 film rated higher than this – Lomography’s Color ’92 is ISO 400 but performs better rated below this, and the specialist colour films (Turquoise, Metropolis and Purple) can be shot anywhere between 100 and 400. Given the very small size of the negatives, the grain is likely to be far too dramatic at higher ISOs anyway.
Shooting the Lomomatic 110
One of the advantages of 110 film – later adopted in the APS format of the 1990s – was that it did away with fiddly film loading. The film is contained in a small, hard plastic cassette, and there’s no re-winding of a finished film back into the cassette; the entire cassette is taken out of the camera, and then sent to the lab for processing.
The Lomomatic 110 is very simple to load, pulling open the film chamber and inserting the new film cassette. Once loaded, it has the old-school 110 camera method of advancing film – pulling the camera out and pushing back in, just like in a Minox spy camera. After a few pulls, the film should have advanced to frame “1”, and after setting the film’s ISO, you can begin shooting. The default ISO setting is 200, the same speed as Lomography’s Tiger colour negative film.
The camera has a switch for shooting in “Day” mode or “Night” mode. These modes control the camera’s aperture: the Day setting sets the camera at f/5.6 and the Night mode sets it at f/2.8.
The detachable flash module has three settings – either flash off, full flash for night and indoor shooting, and a fill flash setting for shooting in daylight. Of course, if you’re going to be shooting in full daylight outdoors, the module can be removed, making the camera smaller and easier to fit in your pocket.
There’s one aspect of the camera that will be very familiar to those who’ve shot the LOMO LC-A, the camera that started this whole Lomography wheeze in the first place; the scale focusing selector is almost exactly the same as the classic four-zone system used on the original LC-A. It has settings for 0.8m (2.6ft), 1.5m (5.5ft), 3m (10ft) and infinity. It also uses the same gold/red/white/green colour scheme for these settings as the LC-A. It’s a nice little touch.
The shutter button doesn’t give a huge amount of feedback; it fires with an extremely quiet click and the there’s not much resistance in the shutter button to tell you you definitely took a shot. It reminds me a little of the Olympus XA, another very quiet camera whose shutter click can be very hard to hear in a noisy environment.
The Lomomatic 110 isn’t a camera which seems to demand much attention beyond getting your shot in the right focus zone and composing the shot. The half-dozen rolls I shot showed some consistent plus points and – it has to be said – some regular disappointments.
The camera’s exposure system is, it has to be said, spot on. None of the pictures I took were badly overexposed or underexposed. This is obviously pretty important in a camera that has no manual over-ride, other than rating your film at a different ISO. Only in pictures with a fair amount of overcast sky to do you see much in the way of haze around the highlights.
That’s the good news. But there’s also plenty of bad. The old-school pull movement both advances the film and readies the camera for shooting. But I’d say something like one in 10 of my shots were blank. I’d accept this in a 50-year-old used camera, but in a brand new one?
Blank frames are one thing, and blurred ones are another. The six films I shot include plenty of blurred images, even when I was in shooting in bright sunshine where the camera should be shooting at its fastest shutter speeds. The camera’s shutter button may be so soft that the extra effort needed to activate it makes camera shake more likely.
The image quality on those shots that did come out OK were a mixed bag, but it would be unfair to put too much of that on the camera itself as 110 is a limited format from the get-go. Because the negative is so much smaller than a 35mm frame , any grain gets noticeably exaggerated. You don’t shoot 110 expecting to make exhibition prints.
It was my first time shooting Lomography’s range of 110 films. I found myself pleasantly surprised by the Turquoise, which offered some to-me-familiar sights (Greenwich, near my home in south London) in a completely different hue.
The Lomography Color ’92 – an emulsion I’d happily rate as one of the most disappointing I’ve ever shot – seems far punchier in 100 format than it does in 35mm. The pictures I shot with it are grainy as hell, but seem far more saturated and less muddy than the rolls I’ve shot in 35mm. Using the flash – which I did out one night with a bunch of fellow film photographers – the results weren’t half bad, but were definitely more in the “great big burst of light” than fill-in flash.
It was in the sunniest weather, oddly, that I had most issues with both camera shake and exaggerated grain. One of the two rolls of Orca black-and-white film I shot were incredibly grainy, especially given that film is 100 ISO and the roll was shot on a very sunny day in May, wandering around Belgravia with a gang of other film photographers. In some shots, the grain looks like 400-ISO film pushed to 3200. It may be that the loaner I was given was having some problems, but it’s odd to have had such pronounced grain and camera shake. In the gallery below you can see how grainy and blurry the last shot is.
It’s a shame because the camera itself is a joy to shoot with. The pull-to-advance mechanism take you right back to the 1970s, and the quiet operation makes it perfect for snapping candids on the street (as long as you’ve turned the flash off, of course).
It’s the pictures captured on a couple of rolls of Lomography Tiger colour film which I’m most happy with. One of these was mostly shot during a summer cricket game at the top of Greenwich Park (on one of the most picturesque cricket grounds I’ve ever seen in the UK) and the results were lovely – especially the portrait-style shot of the game proceeding behind the stack of boundary markers.
Lomography needed the camera back before I really had a chance to play around with the flash and the multiple-exposure settings, but the films I did shoot were enough to sense what a fun camera this is – when it’s working properly. The missed frames and consistently blurred shots on sunny days underlined that this is not a camera for once-in-a-lifetime situations, but better suited to experiments and happy accidents; very much the kind of moments Lomography was built on.
The Lomomatic 110 certainly isn’t overpriced for a brand new camera in 2024 (you could buy five of the Golden Gate version, minus flash, for the price of a Pentax 17) and Lomography should be congratulated for bringing out a camera that doesn’t just add a new colour scheme or shape to the same limited features. It would just be nice if all of those features worked when you wanted them to.
The Lomomatic 110 seems to have been a success; Lomography has brought out new versions of the camera since the launch earlier this year (including a brass version called the Bellagio). While I had the camera on loan, I found myself picking it up even when I wasn’t planning on taking pictures. Shooting 110 film might not be something I’ll want to do consistently, but the experience using this curious camera was pleasurable enough that I’d like to do it again.
It might be time for me to dig out my old Olympus XA and practice shooting with a soft-touch shutter a little more.
Read more:
- Review on 35mmc
- Review on Canny Cameras
- Review on Fstoppers
- Review on Tech Radar
- Review on Digital Camera World
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.
My first pictures were taken on 110 film. The camera was adequate for most situations on various trips. I may get this one because (i) it looks like the spy-cameras you see in old movies; (ii) to experiment with.
The only difficulties are that I cannot develop at home or print easily in a darkroom (although once developed, the film can be scanned).