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    The LomoKino makes hand-cranked movies out of analog film

    The LomoKino makes hand-cranked movies out of analog film

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    The LomoKino can take any type of 35mm camera film you can find — black and white, slide, color negative, high ISO — and uses it to make a very brief movie.

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    LomoKino
    LomoKino

    Lomography's newest product is completely different from their usual plastic-fantastic releases: it's a hand-cranked analogue video camera. The LomoKino can take any type of 35mm camera film you can find — black and white, slide, color negative, high ISO — and uses it to make a very brief movie. It's completely unlike anything else on the market: instead of batteries or LCD screens, it's powered by a hand-crank; there's no SDHC card, you burn through an entire roll of film in just one minute. Where even modern cellphones can record 1080p video in low light while simultaneously capturing stills, this takes one minute of silent, jerky, old-school footage. In 60 seconds it snaps 144 images, fitting four skinny shots in the space of one standard frame.

    Once you've exposed and developed your film, you view it with either a special Lomokinoscope or else use a new web tool from Lomography which converts it to a digital movie. We're not exactly sure how that works, but it's just about the only concession to modernity you'll find here.

    The LomoKino itself will set you back $79, but for $99 you also get the Lomokinoscope, a film canister, and a book about the creation of the device. While that's a remarkably good price for the hardware, feeding this thing's appetite for analog film isn't going to be cheap. It's kind of like the razor blade model, where they get you in with inexpensive hardware but then force you pay through the nose for expensive blades — but in this case you can also buy cheap expired film from eBay.