Digitalising and archiving your favourite childhood photos has always been a drag. You either have to manually scan the photographs (and the quality is not that great) or purchase a special adapter for your scanner to be able to scan the 35mm films. Either way, the process is rather cumbersome that’s why many of us simply cannot ‘bovver’ and the fond childhood memories keep lying about in the shoebox.
Lomography – a dedicated analogue photography community decided to make life much easier and introduce a scanner that lets you convert your 35mm films on a go using just your smartphone and an app. Lomography was founded in Vienna by students and its name is inspired by a famous Russian analogue camera LOMO which you can still by from Lomography’s store. The new scanner will work with an iPhone and any Android device with a hi-res camera. What, no BlackBerry version? 🙁
The way it works is really cool and simple – you just stick your smartphone onto the scanner, load a film and shoot the picture. The clever lens system will project the old film frame onto your phone camera.
As far as resolution is concerned, the dpi will depend on your smartphone model. If you’re after a studio-quality scan job, the Lomography scanner isn’t probably your thing. However, with studio scanners we’re talking an entirely different market and price, so this is really not a fair comparison.
The Lomography Smartphone Film Scanner is available to anyone who pledges $50 + $20 shipping at Kickstarter where they’re using crowdsourcing to fund their amazing endeavour. That makes it around £45 in total. Well, tell you what – it’s exactly how much the mainstream scanner adapters or stand-alone film scanners cost. The products I’ve This thing is really popular. Lomography wanted to raise $50,000 for development but they’ve already made $150,000+ and with a fortnight to go, who knows, they might actually hit the $200K mark.
Mind you, £45 is a pre-launch price and once the gadget hits the stores, it’s bound to cost more. You’ve got till February 4 to visit Kickstarter and grab your film scanner.
