Things you can do with a mobile phone....

[max-greece]

So there was this ebay ad for a 8X magnification lens for any mobile and the price was this side of $10 with shipping (from Hong Kong).

I thought - what the hell, it will probably be crap but its not a lot to lose.

It came yesterday:

Just put my phone onto a tripod (free adapter with the lens).

This is with no lens in place:



This is with the lens inserted without the camera moving at all - so it just zooms in on the centre - I enabled HDR just to soften up the very dark background:



And this is with turning the camera a little and focusing on the tree.



Very little barrel distortion, some light loss but otherwise.....someone tell me how they make and sell a lens like this (its actually just an 8X monocular with a screw thread on the eyepiece) for $10 delivered to Greece?

I don't know how either - but I'm pretty impressed they do.

[vorlon13]

It has a touch of chromatic aberration, but heck, $10 ain't bad. I ordered a wide angle lens for my camcorder and it has a similar problem, but again, for the price, it works well enough. Even zooming the camcorder with the wide angle on it works up to a point.