The amazing world of macro photography (and video) for 50 cents: a review of the noname-set of lens attachments on the phone

For the first time, I began to come across such noz­zles in online sales around the third iPhone. They cost a lot (I remem­ber there were options for $ 100, with an aver­age price of $ 20), the qual­i­ty of the result­ing pic­ture in the pho­to from the sell­ers was of very good qual­i­ty, but the sit­u­a­tion was a lit­tle com­pli­cat­ed by pho­tos from end users, noth­ing more than hor­ror, every­thing it could not be named. So, I myself “slipped through” this peri­od with­out any spe­cial con­se­quences — I have a nor­mal cam­era, and a set of lens­es for it in the range of 8–1000mm EGF, and since I was not fond of mobile pho­tog­ra­phy from the word at all, then I need such a noz­zle I did­n’t see it for myself.

Look­ing through the lots of famil­iar flea mar­keters on taobao, I stum­bled upon such a set for 3 yuan (50 cents) and decid­ed to buy — the price tag is not such as to ruin me, but it was worth see­ing pure­ly because of the pro­fes­sion­al approach — maybe oth­er buy­ers got dull pho­tos for a rea­son the cur­va­ture of their hands, and not because of the poor qual­i­ty of these noz­zles?

In gen­er­al, I bought it. I received it, test­ed it, and some aspects of use seemed so inter­est­ing to me that I decid­ed to share them with you — so that you know what awaits you if you buy such kits, and what you should not hope for. The review will have a lot of pho­tos and lit­tle text — I con­sid­er it a waste of time to describe in words what is already obvi­ous from the pho­tographs.

All pho­tos and videos with­out any pro­cess­ing (except in cas­es where this is explic­it­ly indi­cat­ed) and, if desired, I can upload the orig­i­nals from the phone (Realme X3 Pro) for down­load.

The pack­age includes a box (with the inscrip­tion “good prod­uct”), a pseu­do-suede case, two lens­es (one larg­er, the oth­er small­er, and it is col­lapsi­ble) and a phone hold­er.

As expect­ed — the lens­es are plas­tic and of course there is no anti-reflec­tive coat­ing here (and what did you want for such a price), but the design is more or less high-qual­i­ty, the clamp on the clip is good and the noz­zles are held tight­ly in the hold­er, they do not fall out.

In total, 3 con­fig­u­ra­tions are avail­able to us:

• “Big” lens that promis­es 0.5X mag­ni­fi­ca­tion and Fish­eye
• “Small” lens assem­bly, which fishey does not promise, but offers a mag­ni­fi­ca­tion of 0.67X
• “Macro” (Tail part from the “small” lens) which is intend­ed for macro pho­tog­ra­phy.

So, let’s start the tests (all pho­tos are click­able). In all tests, the pic­tures are in the fol­low­ing order: Full image, crop from the cen­ter, crop from the edge.

For starters, shoot­ing from the same point with­out a noz­zle.

Here — noz­zle 0.67X

And here — already 0.5X

There is an effect of increas­ing the field of view, and tests with a ruler (not shown in the review), as a first approx­i­ma­tion, allow us to con­firm the verac­i­ty of the declared fig­ures — indeed, it turns out almost 0.5X and 0.67X, but at what cost? — the pic­ture can be called more or less decent only in the cen­ter, along the edges — sol­id aber­ra­tions and blur. Per­son­al­ly, I don’t see the point in such an appli­ca­tion — the image turns out to be of poor qual­i­ty, I would be embar­rassed even to post this on Insta­gram …

The last hope for macro, and it jus­ti­fied itself. Of course, this is not a sep­a­rate macro mod­ule, and chro­mat­ic and oth­er dis­tor­tions have not gone away, but there is a prac­ti­cal applic­a­bil­i­ty of such a mod­ule — you can read the inscrip­tions on small micro­cir­cuits and details, take pic­tures of small insects (large ones are also pos­si­ble, but in parts, the max­i­mum size of an object that is com­plete­ly fits into a macro shot — about 3x2cm), and even shoot video (how­ev­er, the pres­ence of a sta­bi­liz­er is almost a must). In order not to be ver­bose, I will give a few exam­ples of pho­tos and videos with com­ments.

Wasp. On the left is the frame as it is from the phone, on the right is a crop and an attempt to cor­rect the col­or.

Close-up of a Viet­namese ban­knote.

Cica­da.

Mar­ble bug (“stinker”)

Lady­bug (macro lens + dig­i­tal zoom)

Ordi­nary mos­qui­to. The left pho­to is with a macro lens. The rest — macro lens + dig­i­tal zoom

Hole 0.5mm in PCB

Now for some video exam­ples.

Lady­bug. In addi­tion to the macro lens, a small dig­i­tal zoom is also applied.

Ants on the tree. It’s just a macro lens. And there is a mim­ic­k­ing spi­der in the frame, find it if you can 🙂

Hours on gas-dis­charge indi­ca­tors IN-12B

Sum­ming up, the macro here is quite decent and the price of 50 cents jus­ti­fies itself by 1000%. (Of course, at the Play lev­el, but you didn’t expect a pro­fes­sion­al result for 50 cents), and every­thing else, even as an effect, won’t be par­tic­u­lar­ly use­ful. I became seri­ous­ly inter­est­ed in the top­ic of get­ting a wider cam­era angle on the phone and bought such a mon­ster (I paid as much as 2.5 dol­lars for it on taobao, when on gno­ex­press it costs from 20). Yes, there is a dif­fer­ence in the pic­ture — the wide angle is much bet­ter, there is no vignetting and blur­ring in the cor­ners is much less, but with macro, things are dif­fer­ent — the approx­i­ma­tion is not as effec­tive as in the case of the reviewed noz­zle, but the effect is more inter­est­ing, “vin­tage ” (exam­ple below). In gen­er­al, let’s see — if this arti­cle “takes off”, then I will review this mon­strous thing, if not, then, alas, there will be no review.