The BBC has an article about the Lomography craze which in essence uses a range of poor quality Russian cameras to elevate snapshots to a form of art.

As mentioned in the article the popularity of certain Lomo cameras has pushed their prices up considerably, but personally if I was going to jump on the bandwagon (which I probably will) then I'd be more interested in a Holga camera which can still be obtained quite cheaply.

If you've got no idea why people are so enamoured with these old film cameras then have a look through some of the Flickr groups dedicated to photos that were produced with them, or using post-processing techniques to reproduce the style, starting with this group for Lomos and this group for Holgas.