Lomo Diana Camera Produces Crummy (Artistic) Images
August 30th, 2007
The Diana camera was a really cheap plastic camera that was made by the Great Wall Plastic Factory in Hong Kong in the 1960s. At the time, it was just that, a piece of junk. But over the years artists have discovered that the crummy little camera’s flaws ended up producing some really dreamy imagery.
Loaded with light leaks, and a propensity to shoot slightly out-of-focus images, the camera shoots on glorious old 120 roll film. No megapixels or flash memory here. Just cool, artsy-fartsy photos.
The original Diana went out of production over 25 years ago. So to bring back the magic to a whole new generation of artists, the gurus at Lomography have dusted off the original camera design and are starting to manufacture Dianas all over again. They’ve added a couple of tweaks to the original, including a 4 F-stop settings and removable lens for pinhole shots, but otherwise the cameras look remarkably unchanged.
Set to ship this October, Unica Home is taking pre-orders now for the $50 “new” Diana camera.
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It’s kind of disturbing how all of this has nothing to do with LOMO.
LOMO is the Russian camera and optical equipment manufacturer making, of all else, LOMO LC-A. What you’re talking about here is lomography and the Lomographic Society.
Sorry for the confusion. I understand that the Lomographic Society and Lomo are two different entities, but Unica Home had the camera listed as a “Lomo Diana”, that’s why I reported it that way. So it sounds like Lomographic Society is having these manufactured, not Lomo.
It seems like lots of people confuse the two, since cameras like the Actionsampler and Colorsplash are often called “Lomo” cameras by retailers too. It doesn’t help that http://www.lomo.com actually goes to the Lomographic Society website too.
hmmm, well i like it, whichever one it is.
LOMO is the name of the Russian factory which used to procuce LC-A cameras among other things. Lomographic society is a society based in Vienna which is selling LC-A and all sorts of other old school photo cameras.
Actually LOMO stands for Leningradskoye Optiko-Mechanichesckoye Obyedinenie (Leningrad Optical Mechanical Amalgamation), but that doesn’t really matter very much, what does matter though is that the fabulous DIANA is available again AND now better than ever!!!
Why can’t you enlargen the photos? Are they not taken with the DIANA?
I bought one of the original Dianas back in the 1960′s.
They were rubbish then, so I see that nothing has changed!!
My first camera was Diana at the age of 9 in 1967.
The first two rolls went blank, then with the third roll I started taking pictures which unfortunately I do not have at the moment.
I found this image and really got excited about it and showed it to my colleagues around.
Now I have a Nikon F4s.