Last Instinct

Did you know that you could get lenses for your mobile phone? A couple of months ago, I found an article at Gizmodo about these lenses. I did some googling and found a retailer in Hong Kong, selling all kinds of strange phone gadgets and more importantly, the kind of lenses I was looking for.

At the moment they are selling three kind of lenses; a 2x tele lens, a 180° fisheye lens and a combined wide/0.67x macro lens.

It was a bit unclear which lens to buy and what size, since the video guides I found were a bit confusing. It didn’t get easier with the fact that the website of the dealer was a bit messy when it came to finding products. But after some comparing I decided that it didn’t matter which one I chose, since they all were unbelievably cheap. About $10-$16 including shipping.

I was worried about the delivery and how trustworthy the company was so I just ordered one lens the first round. I decided to go for a combined wide/macro lens. After about a week I got a mail saying that the package had been sent and about two weeks after that, the package arrived to me in Sweden. The customs declaration on the package actually declared the value of the lens to no more than about $3.

After the first successful delivery, I also ordered a 2x tele lens and a 0.67x fish eye lens. The tele lens was also delivered recently after about 3 weeks but I’m still waiting for the fisheye lens. I will put up some sample images when it arrives. To my joy, the note saying the other order was delayed, was really a piece of beautiful design!

The lenses are mounted onto your phone with a pretty strong magnet. Most phones isn’t ferromagnetic metal, so the package comes with three attachable metal rings to put around the camera on your phone. They are 13 mm outer width and 9.5 mm inner width. You have to make sure that the surface around your camera is flat and that the ring doesn’t cover the flash.

The metal ring fitted perfectly on my Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro and it doesn’t seem to fit on iPhone 4, since it covers the flash. However, when attaching the lenses, they’re in the way of the flash on my x10. Hopefully, they will develop phones with prepared lens mounts in the future.

The lenses comes with lens covers and a strap for keeping hold of your lens. At first, I put the strap on the phone, but I discovered that it wasn’t a great idea since the magnet of the lens affected the compass on the phone, which made the navigation act weird. But then moving the lens away from the phone, everything went back to normal.

The back cover is actually also magnetic and attaches strongly to the lens.

13mm wide/0.67x macro lens

The first lens I tried was the wide/0.67x macro lens. This is an amazing lens which is a wide lens in normal mode and acts as macro lens when mounted apart. The wide mode makes great pictures, but the macro is really stunning.

13mm 2x telephoto lens

The 2x tele lens I got a week ago is not as great as the wide lens. It gets a heavy vignette when used with my phone. I guess its because it has a rather wide angle camera. This makes the lens a bit useless but adds a somewhat cool effect. It would probably be a bit better if the lens was a bit bigger.

13/15mm 180° fisheye lens

The fisheye lens seems the coolest, but I haven’t tried it out yet, since I’m waiting for the package to arrive. This lens comes in to sizes; a 13mm and a 15mm. From what I read, they both comes with the same size metal rings. The 15mm is said to give sharper images with less distortion, so that convinced me to order the bigger one.  Let’s just hope it fits!

I got an attachable wide/macro lens for mobile phone a while ago. I mounted it onto my X10 mini pro and the images with the lens on is really impressive. Also check out the pictures from the tele lens.

The images are untouched.

As well as the wide/macro lens, I go an attachable tele lens for mobile phone a while ago. This lens was not as impressive as the other lens. This one has some heavy vignetting, which made me a bit disappointed.

The images are untouched.