Digital is all well and good - no one can argue with the cost effective practicality - but it's made people lazy. Everyone has a compact digital camera nowadays; social networking sites are flooded with poorly compositioned, incorrectly exposed snapshots... Everybody seems to love taking photos, but do any of these people actually like photography? Why take 500 snapshots, review and delete half, then store them on your laptop for the rest of eternity, only to be uploaded, downsampled, and compressed to a folder named 'random' on facebook... If you like taking photos so much, go buy a real camera, learn the basics, and discover how soulful photography can be. Don't buy that Canon 450D. Save yourself four hundred pounds and get a Pentax K100. Buy some out of date film. Cross process. Have some fun. Experiment.
Anyway, rant over. Back to Diana. There's a huge following for these plastic toy cameras these days. People have embraced and learnt to love the unpredictable outcomes, the imperfections and unrealistic results. I love it so much, I wrote an essay on it for my degree course. For some nice examples - head over to the Diana Flickr group. Here's a couple of mine.
Viva la revolucion!
