Accessory Advice: The iPhone Telephoto Lens
February 22, 2011
Our friends at Photojojo have been kind enough to give us this fabulous new iPhone accessory to check out. The iPhone Telephoto Lens adds 8x zoom to your iPhone’s camera! For you SLR photographers, that’s like a 500mm lens, except this one is a fraction of the size and price!
Hobbyists and serious iPhoneographers will want to take a look at this baby. About the size of a large man’s thumb, it screws onto the included iPhone case. No apps or camera (digital) zoom needed; I used neither when shooting these before-and-after photos. Just the same subject, shot from the same spot. I shot the “before” (left or top of each diptic) shots without the lens and the “after” (right or bottom) shots with the lens attached.
You focus by twisting the focal ring on the lens. Still, I got a bit of a tilt-shift effect (blurry edges with a sharper focus in the middle), which I actually quite like; it lends an artsy touch. If you want the focus to be sharper all the way around, use the included tripod for stability.
The tripod has a ball-and-socket joint so that you can adjust your iPhone to just about any angle. A note about the tripod: I found that if I tried to take pictures in portrait mode, the whole thing just tipped right over when I let go. I had no stability issues with the tripod while the iPhone (with lens) was in landscape mode, though. And of course, you can just not let go if you want a shot in portrait mode.
Obviously you’re not going to get SLR results with a cell phone no matter what you add to it. But if you find yourself frequently using the iPhone camera’s digital zoom and being unsatisfied with it, or cropping pictures so much that you lose half the megapixels, you may want to try this lens out for yourself. The entire kit is certainly small and light enough to fit into a purse, backpack, briefcase, or even a large pocket (like a jacket pocket, not a pants pocket).
Another cool thing I noted is that the included iPhone case works well with the wide angle, macro, and fisheye lenses from Photojojo that I reviewed last year. These other lenses attach via a magnetic ring that sticks to your iPhone or case. The part of this case that contains the threads with which to screw on the telephoto lens actually makes a great housing to protect the ring that attaches the other three lenses. So now, whenever I want to get creative with lenses on my iPhone, I’ll just put on my “lens case”, which allows me to attach this telephoto lens as well as the wide angle, macro, and fisheye lenses.
The 8x iPhone Telephoto Lens comes with an iPhone case (compatible with iPhone 3, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, and Verizon iPhone), a collapsible table-top tripod, a cleaning cloth, and a little bag to carry everything. You can purchase the lens kit from Photojojo for $35 plus shipping.
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