Not all cheap crappy cameras are treated as junk. The Lomographic Society, a Vienna-based experimental photography organization, teamed up with The White Stripes to create two modern-day versions of vintage cameras, the Holga and the Diana. The Holga, as some of you may know, is a cheap (around $15) medium-format camera made in China best known for its imperfections–photos shot with it are often blurry and distorted. Similarly, the Diana–first produced in Hong Kong in the early 60s–is known for its low quality and light leaks, and was most frequently acquired as a cheap prize at carnivals. Some photo enthusiasts love them, though, for the cinematic, imperfect results that come out of normal pics snapped with these guys.
Both cameras come with cool accessories like peppermint film mask filters and fisheye lenses, and are named after the Detroit Duo–”Jack” Holga and “Meg” Diana. Only 3,000 each were produced, but it looks like you can buy them here.
On each side of “actually cool” there lies a horrible valley of endless sorrow that is “paying too much to buy into a fad whose day is over”.
I think you can guess where anybody who buys one of these will be spending their time.
this is really a toy camera , very lovely , I like it very much , does this kind of
camera is on sale now , I want one….
I assume that by “often blurry and distorted” you mean magical and irreplaceable…
Ah, “reimagined” is such a lovely, fluffy bit of marketing speak.
I like the idea behind these but it annoys me how they charge so much for it. A while ago they made custom flash drives for their icky thump release. They were super cool, and came in a pair so I got one for my friend who is a big fan. It was a 512mb drive with the album on it, and the pair cost $100 dollars. I imagine that the price of the drives were a few dollars, and even after subtracting the price for the actual album it was a ripoff in my opinion. This appears to be a similiar situation. I couldn’t imagine paying nearly 200 dollars for a 30 dollar camera just because it’s a different color and is “limited”.
Wow! It’s like they spent .03 seconds “deciding” to slap their business logo/colour scheme on the product, and somehow it is now more important and I must spend more money on it!
I love my Holga dearly, but sadly, the only affordable place to have the film developed closed up shop about a year-and-a-half ago. There’s only one place left in town and it’s not just expensive to buy film, but developing a roll will put you in the poor house.
Photography is dead.
ahhh BB, you’ve done it again, discovering a two year old release and deeming it as new:
http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/news.phtml/10767/11791/White-Stripes-special-lomography-cameras.phtml
kudos!