I was lucky enough to buy my Xpan years ago, but I just want to put in a brief argument to not think of cameras lenses attached to interchangeable dark boxes. Especially now, a lot of the "value" of an expensive camera is the ability to select an interface that will best allow you to work. The Xpan, aside from having some neat lenses, is also one of the most advanced film cameras ever made. It will adjust from pano to traditional mid-roll, it will detect the film iso, it will wind the film for you. Sharpness is, imo, the least of it.
All that said, getting lomo cameras to try out a format is a very good idea and one I heartily recommend.
Agreed. Another cool feature is that the film is shot backwards - it unwinds the film, then shoots the film in reverse, winding it into the canister. This way, worst case, you loose one exposed frame if the back opens. It's this sort of clever thinking that sets this up as a great camera.
And I also picked one up years ago when they were relatively cheap!
Aside from the pano to traditional adjustment of course, everything else, the winding and the detecting ISO is pretty par for the course for late era film cameras. My olympus point and shoot does all that and more, it also has autofocus and autoexposure (spot and area) and multiple flash settings. Canon also had some very interesting film cameras, they had the eye control AF in them and it didn't come back to the digital lines until recently afaik.
I had a bunch of film cameras that would auto set the iso and auto advance the film.
How it did this is 35 mm film had the iso and length encoded on the canister as “dx” coding. There were a bunch of sensors in the camera that measured if one of the squares conducted or didn’t. It’s kinda a neat solution and worked well.
For some cameras that didn't allow custom iso adjustments (e.g if you were going to push or pull the film) you could scratch off or put tape over the dx code to make the camera think it was getting a different iso film and adjust autoexposure accordingly.
All that said, getting lomo cameras to try out a format is a very good idea and one I heartily recommend.