I've had an interest in photography for years -- on and off. Now the world is turning digital for some reason I have developed an interest in 35mm compact cameras. A lot of what I'm going to say on this subject is not original...
My first decent camera was a Minolta SLR. It was about ten years old when I got, but took razor sharp images with its 50mm lens. It got some use for three or four years. But I rarely took it anywhere. I didn't want to carry it or break it. 10 years later when the seals had rotted I traded it in for very capable Nikon F80 with a couple of zooms. This is a fantastically capable camera. I use it for reliable, set up shots or shooting animals/birds. But:
It is huge.
It is heavy.
It is conspicuous.
It is expensive to replace.
It stays in a drawer most of the time.
On the rare occasions it comes out, it terrifies people.
Digital doesn't quite do it for me, although it is excellent for many purposes. I like small cameras with nice high-contrast lenses that fit in your pocket with a decent 35mm film in them. For street shooting and portability the more discrete and compact the better.
I'd heard a lot about the Lomo LC-A, seen the buzz from the Lomographic Society and heard the backlash from others. I liked the results some people were getting from the LC-A, but balked at the extraordinary price being charged for it by the Austrian concessionaires. The LC-A is capable of producing, great images with vibrant, saturated colours. They are not to everyone's taste. The unpredictability of the images runs counter to many 'serious' photographers who argue great shots should be crafted and repeatable. The Lomo can produce happy accidents -- although a steady hand and a few tricks help. In the end I didn't pay the £120 or so the Lomographic Society asks for the device. I was lucky enough to find one in a rambling antiques shop in Tallinn, Estonia -- a few hundred miles from St Petersburg, where it was made in 1984. It was dented, the seals were going and it was so old the text was in Cyrillic. It had a film rating I'd never heard of and it didn't look like it would necessarily work. I paid about £26 for it, bought some batteries and -- more in hope than expectation -- shoved a 200 film in. I got the prints back from a local 1-hour shop a couple of days later and opened the wallet to see if any of them had come out. I was delighted by the results.