New smartphone accessory digitizes your LomoKino movies

Remember Lomography's LomoKino we featured back in November? It's an uber-faux-retro film camera that can shoot about a minute of 3-5 frames-per-second footage using any old 35 mm stills film. Well, Lomography have now released the LomoKino SmartPhone Holder which, though you mightn't have guessed by the name, is a means of digitizing your LomoKino movies using only your smartphone (*cough* by which they mean iPhone *cough*). Cunningly, it's done without need of an app. Just one question, though: why?

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The principle couldn't be simpler. The LomoKino SmartPhone Holder attaches your LomoKinoScope viewer (sold separately, small print-watchers) to your smartphone, so that your phone's camera lens looks into the LomoKinoScope's viewfinder. Hit record in your cameraphone's video mode, turn the crank and hey presto - you've a digital version of your analog video sitting in your smartphone's memory.

After all, why shoot 50 seconds of crisp, high-def video at 30-frames-per-second directly on your iPhone when you can shoot 50 seconds of crappy 5-frames-per-second film, then digitize it with your phone with the use of a US$24.90 bit of plastic - resulting in a video of identical file size? Other than time, money, common sense and pride, I can't think of a single reason not to snap one up.

Even if this does sound like a bit of fun, it's worth considering you'll need both a LomoKino camera and LomoKinoScope viewer if you don't have one already. Along with the LomoKino SmartPhone Holder, these can be had, packaged, for $111.45. And then there's the additional expense of buying and developing film.

If that still sounds like a good deal, I suggest you buy now, before Instagram gets round to launching an update for video which will retro-fy your digital movies sans hardware (and probably for free) thereby rendering this thing even more obsolete than it's supposed to be. I'm all for analog technology, and am even begrudgingly partial to the faux-retro aesthetic - but this feels like a lot of work (and not to mention a lot of physical stuff) for relatively little gain. Once you make the decision to digitize, it's pixels all the way down whichever way you jump.

Source: Tech Radar UK