A macro lens is a must-have if you like to shoot flowers and insects.
There are quite a few add-on lenses for iPhone on the market. They often come in different combinations of fisheye, wide-angle, macro and telephoto. Most of them are crap. But still, it can be fun to have, especially wide angle and macro.
Fisheye taken with an Olliclip.
The wide-angle and fisheye lenses certainly don’t improve the quality of the images. Especially the fisheye lenses create images more bended, then with wider angle.
But there are cases when wider angles are useful. For instance if you are at a party and want to get as many people as possible into the image and the space backwards is limited. And a macro lens is more or less necessary if you like to take images of flowers and insects.
Avoid lenses that will only work with one model
The market-leading brand is Olloclip. They are nicely designed and sold by among others Apple. But if you intend to get a new mobile within a couple of years you may want to think again. It is not probable it will fit you new phone, since Olloclip adapters are designed for specific models. They are also of course much more expensive then other brands of add-on lenses.
We think it’s reasonable that the lens should be compatible with more models than one and that there should be a possibility to use it on future devises as well.
Good, simple and inexpensive
Skinn is a simple construction that you can use on any mobile not thicker than 13 mm.
Skinn is a lens that offers that. The construction in plastic and aluminium is suitably simple. You can use it on any mobile not thicker than 13 mm. The package says it’s for iPhone 4/5, but it fits even better on the brand new iPhone 6 plus. The reason for this is that the flash is a few millimeters further away from the lens than previous models.
One disadvantage with all add-on lenses is that the flash is needlessly close to the lens on iPhone. So is also the case with this lens.
Image taken with iPhone only and one with wide-angle.
The wide-angle will give you 45 per cent more image, according to the manufacturer. Well, the angle is wider.
As usual there is a prise for add-on lenses in form of lesser quality of the images. The wide angle lens will also create some vignetting (darker corners), but in my opinion not as much as with other cheaper lenses.
We especially like the macro lens, where the loss of quality is less eminent. Check out the images yourself and decide whether this is for you or not.
