My review which I originally posted on the FPP flickr discussion, and added a little extra to it here, on the same topic so apologies if people have read it already. Here is the video I created which I didn't post there.
http://www.lomography.com/homes/ctrlclick00/movies/534-lomokino-movie-st-paulsI tried the camera in their workshop. I liked the camera and the look of the results. Easy to use and it has a nice feel to it when winding it. It as potential but I don’t think it’s ready yet.
Negative aspects of the camera.
To load the film the front has to be removed by pressing two buttons, one on either side. The way I was holding it I managed to accidently open it exposing the film inside. It needs a latch or something to stop this happening. I didn’t process this film and loaded the spare roll that I brought with me.
I managed to tear the sprocket holes after loading the camera. It seems to be easy to tear the sprocket holes. The winding mechanism is very simple and the way you know the film is winding is from the tension of the film.
On the first turn, of the second roll, I managed to tear the sprocket holes. I had to open it and wind it a little further pass the broken sprocket holes. And that is also how you tell when the film has reached the end. You can feel the sprocket holes tearing and then the lack of tension. I found the gauge on the side wasn’t accurate at all and somewhat pointless.
In the workshop they mentioned trying stop motion/advancing it a few frames at a time. One full turn is two frames. The problem with that is I found that the spacing was uneven on the negative. I would image this would be a problem when trying to view this in the LomoKinoScope viewer. On the roll that I kept turning at a consistent speed the spacing was even throughout. Inconsistent spacing between the frames seems to cause problems during the scanning process.
These issues / characters of the camera I could live with but my biggest problem is with the digitising process. There seemed to be a lot of dropped frames. There are two folders full on stills that came on the CD they give you plus the movie.
I looked up the camera model in the Metadata, Fujifilm SP-3000. It seems to be a scanner that comes as part of the minilab kit. There is a video on YouTube of someone feeding negative into it and the machine automatically scanning.
(still from first folder - Actual size 1818x1228 at 72dpi )
LomoKino Review - Returned scan by
Tea, two sugars, on Flickr
They take the stills from this and use their software to create the frames.
(Actual still from second folder)
LomoKino Review - Returned still frame by
Tea, two sugars, on Flickr
On one strip of negative I counted 142 frames while there were only 125 frames on the folder. Somewhere 17 frames where dropped. I lined them up in Photoshop and found a section where it was practically bad.
LomoKino Review - Dropped frames. by
Tea, two sugars, on Flickr
From doing this I also notice that they were cropping the frames from the negatives. Here I’ve aligned the frames to show you how much they've cropped them.
LomoKino Review - Compare frame size by
Tea, two sugars, on Flickr
They seemed to be cutting corners in the digitising process. It seems they are feeding it in the machine and it is scanning it as if it was a full frame 35mm neg. on some of the stills its chopped off half the frame and there isn’t the other half on the next still.
I read an article on their site when they were looking for developers to help them create a programme to automatically separates the frames from a still. There was a beta version of the software with I tried and it didn’t work at all. I thought they might have fixed it but it doesn’t seem like it.
I could work with to camera. I’d learnt a lot from the using it although I’m not really happy with the results but I understand the limitations of the camera better now. But the real let down for me is the scanning and digitising process.
