I recently purchased a cheap plastic lens called the Pocket Dispo that apparently is made using old lenses from disposable cameras in order to give an old school film look... if that is what you want. I got the basic version for Nikon f-mount and attached it to my D750. Then I carried the camera around for a couple of weeks and took some sample pics just to see what the result is. I'm inquisitive that way.
I have come to a few conclusions, and the first is that it is really small, light and flat making it very easy to carry around. The second is that it kind of simplifies your shooting by just taking away so many options that in the end your fancy digital camera becomes a a simple point and shoot camera. That was weirdly liberating in a way... no options, just point and click. Cool.
I should probably explain my camera setup at this point. It was really quite simple, full manual mode with auto iso activated to take care of the exposure to a degree. I set it between 64 and 8000 iso to be able to handle a wide range of lighting conditions, and after some test shots increased the exposure compensation to +0,3 to be more pleasing to my eye. At higher iso it gives some grain that I think enhances the "film look". A win. The only other control you have is shutter speed and I adjusted according to need.
As you can see from the photo above the results are quite cool, just what you would expect from an old film disposable camera, very soft around the sides, never quite sharp anywhere in the frame, distorted... well quite awful really if this is not the look you are going for but just perfect if you think it's the arty look you always wanted from your expensive digital camera.
As a walkabout setup it's quite good actually because without the big dslr lens attached to the front of the camera people are not intimidated in the least and so you won't have the kind of reactions you normally get when walking the streets taking pics with humans in. You get ignored, and that's a good thing. Also, no focusing. Point & click, point & click. Awesome.
These photos were all taken in raw simply because my cameras are all set up to photograph in raw all the time. In retrospect I would probably have done better to shoot in jpeg and let the chips fall where they may. As it is I had to run these all through DxO PL8 at standard settings to get jpegs that I could post online. Any improvements would be pretty much what I would get with a normal jpeg setup in camera anyway.
I converted several of the photos to black & white and I think they suit the "arty" look quite well, almost as if this is what I was actually striving for all along... instead of them just being bad quality. 😋
So in summary, if this is the look you are going for then I 100% recommend that you go ahead and lay out the small amount of money it takes to purchase the Pocket Dispo. If however you are expecting great quality images from your camera then you would be better served spending your money elsewhere. This lens is not for everybody, it is a "one trick pony" that does what it does and you must really want what it does. In the right hands I'm sure it will be a great tool that will turn out wonderful photographs to fulfill a certain photographers vision in a fantastically affordable way. In the wrong hands... well just bad.
Here are a few more pics to give you a better idea of what it does:
