Lomography has confirmed that the arrival of its new LOMO MC-A compact camera – which was announced late last month – also means the end of the camera which helped create the company.
In recent months the LOMO LC-A+ – a revised version of the original Soviet-era LOMO LC-A – has been out of stock in Lomography’s online shop.
Lomography’s range of cameras are often temporarily out of stock inbetween production. But there was speculation in the wake of the LOMO MC-A’s announcement that the LC-A+ – which was first produced as a successor to the original LC-A in 2006 – would no longer be produced.
Lomography released a statement to Kosmo Foto, saying: “We are running on the last stocks worldwide at the moment and have been developing the MC-A as his future successor. Taking all its strengths and loved features + adding on to it.”
The LOMO MC-A is a very different camera to the earlier LC-A models, having both zone focus and autofocus, automatic and manual exposure and a metal body influenced by premium cameras such as the Contax T2.
The LC-A+ was an upgraded version of the original LOMO LC-A which was first produced by the Leningrad-based Leningradskoye Optiko-Mekhanicheskoye Obyedinenie (LOMO) in 1984, a Soviet copy of the innovative Cosina CX-2 compact released two years before. The camera, built around the contrasty Minitar-1 32mm lens, was produced until 1994, and then revived by the Vienna-based Lomography in the mid-1990s, who managed to restart production in post-Soviet St Petersburg.
Read this: The LOMO LC-A family
Production of the original camera then moved to China, and Lomography replaced it with the LOMO LC-A+ in 2006, upgrading its exposure system to work with films as high as ISO 1600, adding a multiple exposure function and a shutter button threaded for cable releases. The LC-A+ was produced in a number of special editions as well.
The discontinuation of the LOMO LC-A+ brings production of the classic LC-A compact to an end after more than 40 years, most of it under the auspices of Lomography – making it one of the few Soviet-era cameras that continued production after the fall of the USSR.
The LC-A will live on, however, in two cameras based on the LC-A design – the wide-angle LC-Wide (2009) and the medium-format LOMO LC-A 120, both of which were designed and built in China and are still available.
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.
I know that the whole essence of Lomography is lo-fi aesthetics, but nobody should really be lamenting the end of a cheapo plastic (toy) camera with low-quality soft lens. What the film photography world needs is a return to more, better, new camera options, and that’s what the MC-A is. Just my opinion
I have no strong feelings about the LC-A+ (either good or bad), I am glad they are still making the LC-W & LC-120. The LOMO MC-A certainly sounds like a good camera (although I am looking forward to a fully manual version with a hotshoe flash).