Harrow

This is a clone of the much sought after Diana camera. The Diana first appeared in the early 1960s, manufactured by the Great Wall Plastic Co. in Hong Kong and was a budget plastic toy camera that frequently suffers from light leaks and has a notoriously unreliable film advance mechanism. The plastic lens takes very soft images and produces a heavy vignette. Partly because of this, it has a huge following among lomographers and fans of lo-fi aesthetics in photography.

I'm not entirely sure why this camera (and others such as the Holga) is held in such high regard as plenty of other cameras demonstrate similar characteristics. Our Ilford Envoys take some fantastically soft images, and nothing vignettes quite like the Bencini Koroll II. Originally these cameras were extremely cheap, or just given away as prizes. This makes sense as they were cheaply made and unreliable. It is rather ironic therefore that they are now prized for their artistic qualities. As a result of its massive fan base the Diana can be quite pricey, particularly if you opt for the modern re-issue of this camera by Lomography. Anyway, fortunately if you want the Diana shooting experience there are plenty of rebranded clones out there that can be more reasonably priced. This Harrow cost me £2.20. Even better, get an Agfa Isoly 1 - the camera with significantly better build quality that was the inspiration for the Diana.


Why did we get it? Well partly to see what all the fuss is about, partly because toy cameras are pretty fun, and partly because it was cheap.

So what do you get for your money? Well, the Harrow is an all plastic camera that shoots 16 4x4cm frames on 120 film. It is a box camera with only very basic manual controls. After some research online I am told to expect the lens to produce poor resolution, low contrast, chromatic aberrations, pincushion distortion and "odd colour rendition". The shutter isn't entirely reliable so I may end up with blurry images. It seems the film spool is prone to coming out of place when winding on too. Awesome, where do I sign up? Oh yeah, I already did.


The camera sports an impressive 3 apertures, but Googling won't help you figure out what they are. There are so many conflicting accounts it's better to just measure the apertures on your own model. The same applies to the shutter speed. The lens also takes 32mm clip on filters if all its inherent "artistic qualities" aren't enough for you. The camera offers zone focusing with 3 zones: 4-6ft, 6-12ft, or 12ft to infinity.

As with the Agfa Isoly 1, loading is easy with the flip down flaps beneath the spools.

So there we have it. A camera that on paper is simply terrible, yet is hailed as one of the supreme toy cameras that produces dream-like images. I guess we'll see, the dream may turn out to be a nightmare.

Our measurements with this camera show approximately: a 65mm focal length, apertures of f/11, f/18 and f/26