I have never been a real photographer. The last time I owned a camera (not phone) was 10 years ago. Since smartphone became popular, I have always preferred using smartphones because it’s easier to carry around.
However, occasionally I do wish I had better gears, mostly lens. I recently moved from a big city to somewhere with more wildlifes, and I’m interested in shooting some bird photos, so I guess I need some good lens with zoom factor. Are there any phone accessories that will allow me to do this?
Depends on conditions and what kind of birds but you’d need a pretty long lens (like in 300mm-600mm range), decent autofocus and enough image quality to resolve feather detail… it’s pretty tall order for a phone. I hear some people like Moment add-on lenses on their phones but I don’t think they make long telephoto lenses. Most of the long lens add-ons I’ve seen are of really questionable quality…
Thanks for the info. At least I’m now aware of the options! Let me take a look at Moment add-on lenses.
You’re welcome :) I hope you find a satisfactory solution.
They do sell some zoom lenses compatible with mobile phones, but they’re kind of janky and some phones offer native optical zoom (I think up to 5x now). You’d still be better off with a proper camera with a quality zoom, but the best camera is the one you have!
My Xperia has a 3x optical zoom, but it’s kind of old. There’s definitely better stuff out there by now.
I didn’t aware phones have 5x optical zoom now. I’m still using a Samsung Galaxy S9+, which is pretty old, so buying a new phone is a sensible option. Thanks!
There are, but because you’re adding another optical system on top of another optical system, it’s never going to be quite as good. Top it off, these adapted monoculars (which is what they are) tend to be on the cheaper end, so there’s going to be a lot more optical defects that’ll really show up in a photo.
That’s what I’ve guessed. Thanks for the confirmation. I will try look for some result images to see what quality those phone accessories are.
You can see an example of the best case scenario here, with a high quality Swarvoski spotting scope: http://www.birdchick.com/digiscoping There’s lowered contrast and massive purple fringing even at the lower web resolution.
That’s a very useful read. Thank you!
