Lomography LC-Wide Review: Don’t Call It A Toy Camera

Apply as many filters as you want in Instagram, but you’re not making art. For that you need 35mm film, updated with Lomography’s latest take on an old Soviet classic, the LC-Wide.

Like: It’s light, yet durable enough that it can be thrown into the most hazardous of bags. Shooting with the LC-Wide couldn’t be simpler, though there is a lot to learn (or re-learn) when shooting with the delicacies of film. You can switch between square and half-frame shots using frame mask inserts, plus shoot in standard full-frame, which captures stunningly wide-angle images at 103 degrees. My full-frame shots (taken on some cross-processed Fuji T64 film) have a fantastic amount of vignetting, whereas the Kodak Portra 400VC I chose for the square-frame makes for a more natural colour reproduction.

No Like: Are the new features worth an extra $US100? The LC-A+ costs an already-too-pricey $US250, but $US350 does seem to push the LC-Wide out of the fun-follies bracket and into the dangerous ok-now-you’re-costing-as-much-as-an-entry-level-DSLR redzone. These cameras shouldn’t be viewed as a replacement for digital, but it’s a hard pill to swallow nonetheless. With the added cost of film and developing, it suddenly becomes a very expensive hobby.