Camera Phone Auxilliary Lenses

[donbga]

I'm not sure I have placed this post in the correct forum but here it goes.

I'll be purchasing a new smart phone this week since my 4 year old phone just failed a few days ago. I was never fond of the results of my photos made with my old phone but my new phone will support RAW output using a 12.3 Mp sensor so my curiosity to play around with the new camera, err I mean phone has been piqued.  For the record I'm purchasing the Google Nexus 6P (manufactured by by Huawei and rated the number 3 camera phone by DXOMark http://tinyurl.com/oqomw9w ) to replace my previous Google Nexus 5.

I discovered while doing online research there are number of different kits (of varying brands and prices) of add on lenses for camera phones of all brands. All of them are cheaply priced, err I mean inexpensively priced (the lens kits), which begs this question. What brand of add on lenses are quality optics? I'm a bit skeptical about all of the user reviews I've read so far.

Does anyone know what to get or not get -- or none at all?

Products such as Olympus Air and DXO One are way out of my budget, and other similar products such as the Kodak Pixpro SL10 Smart Lens are described as kludgey and slow.

Thanks,

Don Bryant

[razrblck]

The only decent system I've tried is the iPro from Schneider, but it's iPhone only and way too expensive for what it is.

Any other kit you may find has really cheap lenses, they usually lose all the sharpness in anything but the center (not that they have much to begin with) and can give you some weird color casts as well as strange colors in the corners. You can buy the cheap ones and see for yourself or just to have some fun. They can have their uses, but if you are expecting very high quality pictures out of a phone you are better off investing in a high end compact camera or a entry level DSLR/MILC.

That being said, if you can live with the bad lenses and you have some editing skills, you can probably still get something nice out of it.

[donbga]

Nice shot, especially for an iPhone camera though my brother has made some very nice 11x14 prints made with his iPhone 5s using the native lens only. Did you use an auxiliary lens for this photo?

Thanks,

Don Bryant

[razrblck]

It's from my Lumia 640. I tried using those cheap lenses, but they vignette so much on my phone that it's like using a circular fisheye on a DSLR. They also lower overall sharpness a lot. The native lens is not that great, the sides and corners are all smudgy (yes, I always clean the lenses before taking a shot like that one), but I can't expect much from a "budget" phone.

My old Samsung Omnia 7 had better optics but a worse sensor. Still, I got plenty of shots I love out of that, even in not so good light.

[Alan Smallbone]

All of the add on lenses that I have tried have had a lot of issues with sharpness, chromatic aberration, and really not worth it. I got a grip/holder for my phone because i was doing some experiments and some video stuff. The native lens is by far better. The Beastgrip is nice if you want to use filters and add other lighting or tripod use. I have a Galaxy S7 and the native lens is super sharp and the images are great for such a small sensor.

Alan

[donbga]

Thanks Andrea and Alan. Sounds like the add on lenses are crap as I suspected. I'll work with the native optics. This could be a variation of Mike Johnson's suggested project, One Camera, One Lens, One Year -- OC/OL/OY.

Did he ever follow through with that project? I doubt it knowing him but that's irrelevant about current topic. I'll try to post some images after I get the cam and get a chance to do some work with it.

Don Bryant

[razrblck]

You are a bit limited with the native lens, but I think it pushes creativity. Having manual controls it greatly helps shooting at base ISO (on my phone it's 64) or with plenty of light but still below ISO 400, to maximize quality. I do not have controls over sharpness or color profiles, but my phone handles images rather well. Having a tripod attachment is very useful.

Some out of camera examples:





















My phone has a hard limit at 4 seconds for long exposures (hardware limit, possibly to prevent sensor overheating), but it's still long enough to make light trails from cars or make decent exposures even in very low light situations. The dynamic range is also much higher than I expected from such an inexpensive phone. What I noticed is that on my screen (that has actually a lot of settings to balance color, temperature and contrast), shadows always appear to have less details than what was really captured. In Photoshop I do have quite a bit of headroom on the files.

[AFairley]

I tried a cheap 2x tele lens on my iPhone5, I found that I ended up with better final image quality just cropping the image and letting Lightroom uprez.  I imagine it would be the same with cheap WA adapters.