Few people have heard of it, yet many consider John Blankenbaker's KENBAK-1 to be the first commercial personal computer.
An $80 Hand-Cranked 35mm Movie Camera
By James Grahame
The LomoKino is a hand-cranked 35mm movie camera that shoots up to 144 frames on a roll of 35mm film. Once you've shot your footage, just get a film lab to process it without cutting it into shorter strips. The resulting movie can be viewed on the accompanying LomoKinoscope viewer -- just point it at a light source and you can watch your film on the tiny opaque screen at the rear.
The real fun comes when you scan the film and share it digitally (oh, the irony...). However, that could be a tricky task because standard desktop film scanners aren't set up to capture and align widescreen movie frames. Still, I'm sure someone will figure out a reasonable work flow and post details on the web in no time.
The secret to this device is that each incredibly skinny film frame measures 24mm wide x 8.5mm tall, allowing far more shots to be captured on a roll than usually possible. It's capable of shooting at 3-5 frames a second, so don't expect realistic motion. That said, there's a flash hot shoe mount that would make this camera ideal as part of a low budget animation rig.
The 25mm lens has an adjustable aperture of f/5.6 to f/11, giving you the rough ability to control the amount of light that hits the film. It has two focusing modes - Close-Up (60cm) and Normal (1m to infinity). The top-mounted inverse Galileo viewfinder will give you a rough idea of what you're capturing, although shooting from the hip is probably far more appropriate with this quirky movie camera.
