“Could Zeiss make iPhoneography even better?” Les Shu reprots for Yahoo Finance. “The optics company is collaborating with ExoLens to develop a series of Zeiss-branded mobile lenses for its iPhone interchangeable lens bracket system.”
“The Zeiss-ExoLens lenses – the Mutar 0.6x Asph T* wide-angle, Mutar 2.0x Asph T* telephoto, and Vario Proxar macro zoom – use Zeiss’ optics design, which is known for quality,” Shu reports. “Made out of black anodized aluminum, they are specially coated to reduce reflections and light transmission, but they use the same mounting system as existing ExoLens variants, which screw onto a metal bracket that slips onto the iPhone (6/6S and 6 Plus/6S Plus).”
ExoLens iPhone interchangeable lens bracket system
“‘The wide-angle and telephoto lenses offer excellent image performance with outstanding edge-to-edge contrast,’ Zeiss says. ‘The macro lens features a zoom function — unique for accessory lenses of this type — for flexible image composition.’ Chromatic aberration is also corrected,” Shu reports. “The photos do look impressive.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The photo examples are indeed impressive:
• Wide-angle: www.flickr.com/photos/carlzeisslenses/sets/72157669565591915
• Telephoto: www.flickr.com/photos/carlzeisslenses/sets/72157668679882460
• Macro: www.flickr.com/photos/carlzeisslenses/sets/72157666932423733
The telephoto lens has “teeth”
Shame on you. I thought she was cute until I connected your comment to the pictures. 😛
This is the second one of these that I’ve seen newly available just today. I think they’re rushing the sale because the next iPhone will have multiple lenses, making such strap-ons worthless without serious redesign.
I’ve never really understood the point of add-on lenses for iPhones except for some specialised uses.
Obviously I understand what those lenses do, but that’s not what puzzles me. The camera on an iPhone is pretty decent and takes good quality pictures under a wide range of conditions, but the key advantage is that it’s the camera that’s never further away than your pocket. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing, the chances are that you can get your iPhone into photography mode within two or three seconds.
If you have to fit an adaptor to your iPhone and then a lens to that adaptor, you might as well reach for a ‘proper’ camera which will accept a wider range of lenses and offer more creative control than an iPhone.
If an iPhone were to have a varifocal lens, then that would make it even better, but I’m not sold on the concept of add-on lenses except for a few specialised purposes.