The Lomo’Instant is available in four awesome styles and is the perfect size to take wherever you go! It’s the most creative way to shoot fantastic photos which you can share anywhere and with everyone in an instant. Enjoy the beauty of analogue photography and get inspired with this feel good instant camera! Go Wild With Lovable Instant Features The viewfinder protrudes out to the side of the camera, and is clearly designed for right-handed users. Lefties will have to squish their nose into the casing to get their eye correctly aligned with the viewfinder. The basic optics have rough guidelines, but you’ll often find more of the scene in your photo than it suggests.

You use the lens to turn the camera on or off. Twisting the barrel extends it (and adjusts focus) and brings the Automat to life. Despite sporting automatic exposure, focus is a purely manual affair. The barrel has marks for distant focus, moderate focus (3.3 to 6.6 feet), and close focus (1.9 feet). The lens is a 60mm prime that has f/8 and f/22 settings, matching the field of view of a 28mm prime on a full-frame 35mm camera system. Automatic shutter speeds range from 8 seconds to 1/250-second. Lomo has carved out a good niche within the photographic community, providing fun and quirky cameras which are charming if not particularly precise or accurate. As always with Lomo, the unpredictability of it is part of the charm - don’t expect perfection every time and you should be more than happy. The price of this camera is quite expensive, but as it is so easy to use, some people may feel this is value for money - it may also come down in price as it spends longer on the market. A small viewfinder window is found in the top left hand corner of the Lomo'Instant Automat. You can use this to roughly frame your photo, but thanks to parallex error, it’s not completely accurate and you may find you need a bit of practice to understand exactly what is, and what isn’t, likely to end up in your shot. On the right hand side of the camera is the tripod thread, while there are lugs on the top of the bottom of the camera which can be used for attaching a strap.

In said good light, images are bright and punchy, with a pleasing level of saturation and depth to them. Sometimes you may find if you’re using the lens adapters you see strange lens flares and so on - but again, this is arguably part of the charm of using a camera like this. The power switch is located at the bottom of the lens board, with settings for off, A, C Flash, and C. You'll want to use A indoors with the flash, as it's really required to get a proper exposure. C Flash is recommended for use for long exposures with a flash in conjunction with the Bulb shutter, and C disables the flash and gives you a bit more control over exposure. Also on the bottom is the switch to toggle between the standard 1/125-second shutter speed and Bulb exposure. Here, Lomo has taken the Automat up a notch by offering a Glass lens. It means that the results are much sharper than the plastic equivalent offered in previous incarnations of the Automat. At times, this means that you can get very sharp results - with charming prints in the Instax format. At other times, such as when trying to focus closely, you may find that the results are a little more hit and miss. Lomography got its start as LOMO—the Leningrad Optical Mechanical Association. This was a company in the late Soviet Union which produced optical elements for the medical industry as well as cameras.

For this review, we dedicated weeks to using each camera in numerous places and under all kinds of lighting conditions to determine how each performed. Our test results represent more than 100 hours spent taking over 1000 photos in lighting conditions ranging from dimly lit bars to sun-soaked beaches. We also let our creativity run wild and took hundreds of images using long exposures, flash filters, multiple exposures, and every other creative option these cameras offer. We then compared the different results to determine the best contenders. As is very often the case with Lomo products, the best way to describe the results from the Lomo'Instant Square is “mixed”. In other words, with a camera like this, you can’t, and shouldn’t, expect to get perfect results with every shot - which some people will argue is all part of the Lomo charm. So, what makes a lomography camera so special? It’s an embrace of the history of photography as well as avant-guard approaches to what counts as a “good photograph.”

Easy Experiments for Starters

There’s no screen to indicate which settings you have chosen, instead small green lights will activate to show that you have that setting working. For example, if there’s a green light next to the flash icon, that means it’s on - if there’s no light, it’s not. Where there are two options per button (for example, positive exposure compensation and negative exposure compensation), the light will appear next to the corresponding setting - for example the + sign, or the - sign. The exception to this is the MX setting, which has an orange light instead of a great light. You’ll find the Automat Glass’s shutter release on the front of the camera. It takes the form of a mirrored rectangular button, which means that you can use it as a “selfie mirror” when composing self-portraits. The camera’s flash is also on the front, and there is space to insert coloured filters to change the look of your images. A ‘B’ (for bulb) switch means that you can snap long-exposure shots – ideal for light streaks at night.