Smartphone Lens Systems

Smartphone Lenses

There are several advantages to smartphone photography. You always have your camera with you, it’s light and agile, and it’s just plain fun! To extend the smartphone photography fun, there’s a wide variety of relatively inexpensive accessories to choose from. There are cases, selfie sticks, tripod mounts, bluetooth triggers and lenses, yes lenses. If you do a search for smartphone lenses, you’ll see that there are a lot of choices out there. Some are large, some are small, some are complex, some are simple, some are low quality plastic and some are high quality glass.

I recently took the time to test 2 smartphone lens systems in a practical way. I took the arguably most popular smartphone lens system, the Olloclip lens system and a generic clip-on lens system and compared them. There is a difference in price, but is there really a difference in image quality?

I secured my smartphone on a tripod to make sure that the scene remained constant for comparisons. I also chose a scene with a lot of fine detail (plants, grass, branches, shadows, etc.) to really test the capabilities of the lenses. I spent a lot of time and meticulously shot a variety of images that, I think, will help you see if there is any difference between the lens systems.

For details and my impressions, check out the video I created below.