TamsPalm - the Palm OS Blog

Since the days of the CommuniCam Armed T68i, cell phone cameras suffered from a common problem:the fixed focus width of their lenses. Thus, users were forced to adjust the distance that they had to the object if they wanted to use their CCD’s optimally.
Now, Brando has developed an acceccoire for the accecoire-sticky lenses that one can mount behind the lense of the camera to modify it. TamsPalm received two lense sets containing the following lenses for review:
Mobile Phone /PDA Camera Lens Combo Set 1

• Tele lens
• Soft Filter
• Kaleidoscope strip

Mobile Phone /PDA Camera Lens Combo Set 2

• Macro Lens
• Distortion lens
• Kaleidoscope triangle

The lenses ship in a regular envelope:

This envelope contains even more packaging matereal:

The lenses themselves are packed into little triangular cases locked via magnetism. Each lense is color-coded to simplify selection:

If a lense should be used, one sticks it onto the phone’s camera. The lack of a second cam made a photo of how this looks impossible, but it worked reasonably well on my SX1. Anyways, lets now look at the various lenses!

Macro lens
The green macro lens is interesting as it has “sticks” protuding from its front. It took me some time to figure out that they do-you have to lay the phone on them in order to have an accurate image.

This requires loads of ambient brightness(the phone is above the item!), but can produce funky images like the “screenshots” below-please look at the T3 to see the objective errors in the corners:

Tele lens
The red tele lens has a big bug-like optical glass lense that is extremely prown to fingerprints:

Its optical function is a 1.5x magnification of the focussed object. These images illustrate the effect(left is unmodified):

It also allows you to magnify close objects for better detail resolution:

Kaleidoscope strip
This black lense is not of optical value, it rather recreates the optical distortion a kaleidoscope creates:

Indeed, the effects look funky and have good quality. You can alter the distortion by rotating the lense before gluing it to the phone. However, the lense is too small to fully cover my SX1. Thus, you loose part of the image area in the corners…

Kaleidoscope triangle
This blue lense is similar to the one mentioned above as it also tries to simulate a kaleidoscope-but this time its a triangular one.

All said above(rotation, size) is also valid here. However, the images produced are different:

Soft filter
The yellow soft filter suffers from the same size problem as the kaleidoscope ones:

A soft filter modifies images by blurring their outer region. Please look at these images to see what I mean:

Distortion Lens
The black distortion lens is difficult to describe. It is big enough for my SX1 and has good optical properties:

However, the distortion is dependant of the rotation of the lense:

The build quality of the lenses is upper average. One of the lenses survived 20 cycles(stopped testing after 20x), the foil went off another one after 5 times. Thus, the main issue with the lenses is the sticky tape. It may be possible to replace it with another, and Brando gives you 3 months of warranty. The carrying box easily survived 50+ cycles btw…

Overall, these lenses are funky and definitely were fun to review. However, they are extremely expensive. For example, a person wanting a tele and a macro lens has to buy a total of 6 lenses.
The “optical” lenses have good image quality(distortion is visible but not too annoying-phones with smaller lenses probably won’t have those problems). They are big enough for an SX1. The tele lens is pretty good, the macro lense works well for people who have a phone that doesn’t throw a shadow on the (light emitting) object.
The “fun” lenses are of different quality. They all deliver good images-but some of them are too small for a stock SX1. Also, the distortion sometimes is dependant from the rotation of the lens-which greatly reduces reproducibility of images.
Deciding about purchase is difficult. The tele and macro lenses are good, but one needs to keep them in their cases all the time which adds weight. Thus, the weight difference between digital camera and our “construction” becomes smaller.
So, if you want to temprorarily modify your phone’s camera, this is the way to go. If you want to permanentely change properties of the camera, a small, cheap digital camera with a good objective will suit you better.