Saturday, September 04, 2010

Wide Angle Camera Phone Lenses

Dippence tipped me off on (or perhaps just promoted) these cool attachment lenses for practically any camera-phone (they attach magnetically). There's a fish-eye, and a combined wide/macro.

They look very cute/fun and even high quality, and for a surprisingly low price. Almost too low to be as good quality as they seem, but heck, fun is fun.


One should note that such lenses of course does not replace the phone's existing lens, it modifies it. This means that the end result can't be quite as high quality optically as the lens on its own, but then with today's optics it does not need to be very much lower either.

The reason is that lenses are very precise and complex, and if you add something to a lens, it has to be painstakingly attuned to and produced for exactly that lens to not reduce the quality. Nikon for example has a zoom lens and tele lens with dedicated teleconverters which deliver virtually the same quality as the naked lenses, but this is an unusual achievement. 

3 comments:

Alex said...

We've just started using some Bower lens at work, we have some small video cameras we use to film screen transitions on the devices we make. The native lens didn't do a good job of anything closer than say 8".

Just as good as adding a Sunpak diopter converter/close up in front of your lens, gets you over the hump.

I had screw ins for my Kodak PnS camera, but that's not always an option. How easy is it to get one of these lenses off centre? And when you do, what effect does it give you?

Dibutil said...

Just got the 180°, quality is fair fir for the price, it even looks like single-coated. I did not like the metal "sticker" rings that get on the phone - they fall off pretty soon.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Thanks, DF.

Alex, I would think that visual centering is easy enough, and that a milimeter off should not impact quality very much.