Lomo LC-A (1984-2005)

Lomo LC-A (1984-2005)

#425

This photo is from the copy I own

History and technical features 

he LOMO Kompact Automat (LC-A) was produced by LOMO PLC in St. Petersburg, Russia from 1984 until 2005. This compact 35mm film viewfinder camera was based on the Cosina CX-2, but lacks the self-timer and is built with cheaper components, including the fairly soft Minitar lens.

It was the LOMO LC-A that sparked the Lomographic Society (LSI).

After production ended, LSI contracted with Phenix Optical Company in China to create an updated version called the LC-A+.

Source: camerapedia

Lomo Compact group consists of 5 different cameras. Although the famous Lomo LC-A is surely the most promoted soviet camera in the World, at least 3 of the rest cameras are almost unknown to collectors community indeed. Below you will find an unique information about all 5 Lomo Compact cameras with actual pictures of real cameras, not the bad quality paper scans.

Beeing actually an exact COSINA CX copy, LOMO LC-A is just a crappy little Soviet/Russian compact 35mm camera with scale focusing and automatic exposure control.  It also sports a 32mm lens which is slightly wider  than most compact 35's.

Source: sovietcams.com

The Lomo LC-A should be nothing more than historical curio, something that crops up in the collections of the most die-hard Soviet camera collectors. Like more than a few Soviet camera designs, the LC-A was a Soviet redesign of a Western camera – in this case Cosina’s CX-1 and CX-2, pocket-sized Japanese compact 35mm cameras with a superb lens.

The designers at Lomo (Leningradskoye Optiko-Mekhanicheskoye Obyedinenie) in Leningrad (now St Petersburg) first clapped eyes on the Cosina – history is split over whether it was a CX-1 or a CX-2 – in the early 1980s. The Lomo top brass were impressed with the little Japanese camera, which boasted a sharp, contrasty lens that resulted in rich, saturated colours, heightened by vignetting around the corners. By 1984, Lomo’s engineers had managed to build a ‘tribute’, a faithful yet simplified version. They called it the Lomo Kompakt Automat – or, as it would be known in the West in the decades to come, the LC-A.

Lomo began producing 1,100 a month of these cameras from June 1984. Unlike the ubiquitous Zenit SLRs, a favourite of many budget-minded amateur photographers in Western Europe, the LC-A was intended for domestic consumption. In fact, some 5,000 LC-As were especially stamped to commemorate the 27th Communist Party Congress in Moscow in 1986 (the first presided over by reform-minded party chairman Mikhail Gorbachev).

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, this strange little camera – which had built up many a fan in Soviet-aligned countries – became a secret no longer. And when a bunch of Austrian art students – the group who would later form Lomography in Vienna – found an LC-A in a Prague junk shop that year, they catapulted the LC-A to global fame.

As the LC-A celebrates its 33rd birthday, Kosmo Foto is profiling the family of cameras inspired by Lomo’s humble LC-A.

Source: kosmofoto.com


Specifications

First produced in 1984, the LC-A was almost unknown outside the USSR and other Communist states until the end of the Cold War. A cruder copy of Cosina’s CX-1 and CX-2, the LC-A shared many of the cult Cosina’s features (its biggest change was getting rid of the moving lens cover of the Cosina in favour of a simpler slider). It was a zone focus viewfinder camera, with four focus zones to choose from (0.8m, 1.5m, 3m and infinity) and an automatic setting (via a lever on the front left of the camera) that chose both shutter speed and aperture.

The LC-A’s 32/2.8 Minitar lens had an aperture range of f2.8 to 16, and its shutter speeds went from 1/500 to two seconds; more than enough to capture a shot in all but the most difficult lighting. Should photographers want a little more control, they could choose an aperture manually – but they would be restricted to a single shutter speed of 1/60. In reality, most snappers simply stuck the LC-A on ‘A’ and fired away.

The LC-A’s ability to keep the shutter open long enough in low light was one of its secret weapons. LC-A fans soon learn that shooting it handheld (the LC-A came with a tripod socket but no hole for a cable release in the shutter button) meant light sources would often become abstract trails. These were heightened by the lens’s tendency to boost contrast and vignetting, which could be further boosted by shooting cross-processed slides – Agfa’s original CT100 Precisa and Kodak’s Elite Chrome 100 soon became the standard for LC-A fans.

The LC-A further aligned itself as a night-time camera thanks to its qualities when used with a flash – the LC-A uses rear-curtain flash, rendering the background of a scene before the flash illuminates the front.

Original LC-As – sporting the name in Cyrillic letters and a tiny CCCP badge on the back – used the Soviet film rating system, GOST, which is close to but not exactly aligned to the West’s ASA/ISO rating (GOST 65 is roughly equivalent to 100 ISO). The highest GOST setting is 250, the equivalent to around 400 ISO.

There, were, however, various export models of the LC-A that used the Western alphabet and Western ISO settings aswell. Some of these were exported as the “Zenith Lomo”, perhaps to trade in on the Zenit brand name that was so well known in the UK.

Soviet-era LC-As still crop up reasonably often on eBay – and should you head east of Berlin on your travels, they’re still fairly common in cameras stores and flea markets. The major cause of failure is damage to the electronics – if these are on the blink, an LC-A is little more than a paperweight, as without batteries or a functioning exposure system, the camera’s shutter won’t open properly. Thankfully, the LC-A runs on three buttoncell LR44/SR44 batteries, which are cheap and plentiful.

Source: kosmofoto.com


Model

PK7350. The most common Lomo LC-A type to find nowadays. Export "LOMO" markings on the frontplate. International ASA settings. No otherwise different.

Source: sovietcams.com


Reference sites

camerapedia

kosmofoto.com

sovietcams.com


Manual

English manual


Batteries

3 LR44 batteries

Film


Pictures taken with this machine


Videos