It has a surprisingly solid build for a Lomo model. The MC-A immediately impressed me with its steel chassis with no visible bends. The film-advance lever, film-door release, and movie-rewind crank are also made of metal, giving the camera an incredibly premium feel — a stark contrast to the “cheap and cheerful” Lomo cameras of the past.
The headline (which reads “Everyone is equal in front of the lens — and behind it”) isn’t to everyone’s liking but is very much in line with Lomography’s philosophy when it comes to photography. And if you don’t like it, well, gaffer tape is cheap.
It’s not exactly small, but fits nicely in a jacket pocket. MC-A is compact, even if it is not as small as the smallest points of the best day of the film, like the Olympus Mju series. I carried it around Japan for two weeks, mostly in my hoodie pocket, and never felt its nearly 0.75-pound weight.
The camera’s ergonomics are good, too, with well-placed buttons, a power switch that doubles as a focus mode selector, and a small front grip that gives plenty of purchase for even my biggest mitts.
It has all the features you need, and nothing you don’t. MC-A eschews some of the luxury touches that were common in film scores in the ’90s and ’00s, such as automatic panning and rewinding. Still, it packs an impressive number of high-end features all focused on sharp, sharp images.
It includes a shutter speed and aperture dial, a ±2-stop exposure compensation dial, a flash control, an ISO control (and DX code reading), a timer, and a PC sync port for external flash.
Most interesting is the multiple exposure (MX) button: Just shoot, press the button, and shoot again without twisting to get a layered composition. If you decide to do multiple exposures, just be sure to adjust your exposure using the compensation dial (I used -1 stop).
Finally, I liked the large LCD screen, which shows the frame count of your roll, focus mode, flash settings, and more. If you forget to roll your film, it will even flash an informative graphic when you press the shutter button.
Its autofocus is fast and accurate. The MC-A uses a fast and accurate lidar autofocus system, even in low light. Only a few shots out of my eight test rolls were out of focus, and most of those were due to me forgetting the short focus distance (0.4 meters, or about 16 inches) or simply focusing on the wrong object.
Optical windows are lidar’s Achilles’ heel, but the MC-A offers a workaround for that, too: spatial focus. Like the Pentax 17, this camera can focus at several preset distances (0.4, 0.8, 1.5, and 3 meters, or infinity), avoiding the need for autofocus if you know how far away your subject is.
It comes with many accessories. Taking the MC-A out of the MC-A was a much better experience than I expected, from the thick fabric that wraps the camera to many small boxes containing unexpected accessories: a UV filter, colored flash filters (gels), a leather wrist strap similar to the budget version of my all-time favorite, and Lomo’s famous Splitzer.
A CR2 USB-C–rechargeable battery is included, and the instruction manual comes in the form of a coffee table picture book.
The picture quality is good enough. It may mean I waited too long to discuss the MC-A’s image quality. Let’s just say it’s not a strong camera suit.
In many ways, the MC-A is reminiscent of earlier Lomo film cameras. The 32mm f/2.8 lens creates a lot of vignetting, especially wide open, and especially on newer copies that include a baffle behind the lens. The glass, while covered, tends to open, producing both a colored light (often blue) when the lights are directly in the frame and the opening of the cover (on front copies without a baffle) when close but outside the frame.
However, it’s quite sharp in the center of the image and wide open, and gets sharper around the edges and corners as you go down to between f/4 and f/11. Bokeh, if you can create it, is interesting in the way of many vintage points: swirly, funky, very Lomo.
Honestly, no one buys this type of camera to get perfect image quality. You buy this type of camera for portability, character, and fun, and the MC-A delivers.