Clip-ons widen phonecam capabilities

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Chris Griffith reviews the Olloclip, a slip-on lens for the iPhone 4S.



THE current crop of 8-megapixel camera phones makes it ever harder to justify owning a separate point-and-shoot device.
LED flashes and features such as face recognition and better lens performance make the cameras on upmarket smartphones truly useful devices.

But there are limitations to the flexibility of phonecams.

Poor handling of extreme lighting conditions, especially low light, shallow depth of field, and fixed focal lengths are some.

Olloclip, a small device that clips to the edge of the iPhone 4 and 4S case, adds fisheye, macro and wide-angle lenses capabilities to the camera and extra composition choices.

The fisheye and wide-angle lenses are at either end of the plastic clip that attached to the phone.

Turn the Olloclip around to go from one to the other, or unscrew the tiny wide-angle lens to access the macro lens beneath it.
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Sam Mooy, a photographer for The Australian, test-drove our review Olloclip and particularly liked the fisheye and macro lenses. He found the wide-angle lens a few degrees too wide, with pronounced distortion of lines along the right-hand edge.

The fisheye offers a 180-degree view and can turn stock compositions, such as photos of people at their office desks, into arty and detail-packed shots, while the macro lens captures sharp close-ups of objects less than 12mm away. The shallow depth of field worked well in highlighting the head of a garden spider that Mooy shot.

Being attached to the macro lens makes the wide-angle lens a complicated piece of kit. Light passes through three lenses. The wide-angle doubles the normal field of view, but the distortion is pronounced and, according to Olloclip's own frequently asked questions page, deliberately so.

"When it came to the design of the lenses themselves, we had to err on the side of the quality of the optics for the fisheye and the macro, and we believe that decision speaks for itself," the FAQ explanation says.

"Most of the time you'll hardly even notice it, for example landscapes, versus taking photographs of a wall or something that has a lot of linear content or lines."

But we did notice it in several shots and the wide-angle lens is the weak point of the kit.

Mooy found focus and light did not suffer with the Olloclip attached, but focusing and light adjustment times doubled. Being tiny, it was easy to smudge the glass lenses, especially when changing them, so keeping the Olloclip clean is a priority -- as is not losing it.

The Olloclip lenses cannot be adjusted, so you have to make do with their inbuilt settings.

The Olloclip also works when shooting video, but Apple's natural cropping of video loses the vignette effect.

Unfortunately, the Olloclip obscures the iPhone's Flash, so forget night-time social clips and very low-light indoor snaps unless you can find a natural light source. We found iPhone photography was enhanced by using the Camera+ app instead of the standard Camera app, as it offers easier light setting and has a series of useful post-processing options in addition to the accessory lenses.

In summary, the Olloclip is far from perfect if you are anything like a serious photographer, but for general pocket camera use it is a lot of fun and worth consideration for what it is.

The Olloclip sells for $100 in Australia from outlets such as Fone Zone and Next Byte, so it's not a cheap camera accessory, but you can buy it for $70 online from the US.

It is by no means the only lens you can attach to an iPhone.

For $US35 ($34) to $US40, you can buy a 12x telephoto lens for the iPhone 4/4S that attaches using a case with an inbuilt tripod.

If you own Nikon lenses, you can buy an adapter that lets you use them with the iPhone 4/4S. It includes an aluminium case, SLR lens adapter and UV filter.

RATING: 7.5