Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Recently I bought a set of lens attachments for my iPhone. It's the Apexel 4K HD Mobile Phone 5-in-1 Camera Lens Kit (B&H link). It's still on sale for $44.95— a price low enough that when I ran across it at random while shopping for something else I was like, "Hmm, that looks interesting. At that price why not try it?"

You can follow the link above to see what the fancy product photos look like. Here's a handheld pic of what arrived in the mail.



The five lenses come in a nicely padded case. It may only look like there are four... the fifth is beneath the attachment clip in the bottom slot.

My first thought was, "Wow, these are bigger than I thought."



I guess the product photography showed them with a larger format iPhone. I'm still rocking a older, smaller iPhone 7.

The kit comes with 5 lenses, as I mentioned. One's a 2x teleconverter. It's the largest. Three are wide-angle adapters, with varying width multipliers. One's a relatively modest wide-angle, one's more significant, and one's a fish-eye. The fifth adapter is a macro lens, enabling close-up focus. It's not clear how much of a difference the macro makes as my iPhone can already focus from a few inches away. Getting closer tends to create problems with light.

I gave all the lenses a quick test at home. The clip barely holds onto the edge of my iPhone 7. I think it was designed primarily for larger form factors. But it works. And for $45 with 5 lenses I didn't expect a lot more.

All five of the lenses work. Image quality seems to... not suck. That was one of my concerns with buying such an inexpensive kit. It turns out there's actually a lot of glass here for $45. A single better lens can cost twice as much as this whole set of 5, so this seems like a bargain. I'll try a more careful comparison when I get a chance to shoot something other than my desk.