Using Clip-on Lens in Mobile Photography

A lot of people spend money on buying Quad cam Smartphones, i.e, Phones with 4 lenses.

Usually these lenses are – Main lens, Ultra-wide lens, Macro Lens and Portrait Lens.

This is nothing but a great marketing gimmick by phone making companies.

Let me explain why.

They heavily market these Quad cam phones but what they don’t tell you is that except for the main lens, the other lenses only offer very less megapixel capacity. Usually if you have a 64 MP camera for the main lens, the other lenses are between 4 to 10 MP.

So even if you are doing Macro Photography, you will be forced to do it at something like 5 MP, which can be very bad for the image quality.

So what’s the better option?

The better option is to go for external lenses which can be clipped on to the MAIN LENS of your camera and turn it into a Macro, Ultra-wide or Portrait Lens.

These lenses are called Clip-on lenses, like this one.

Using a clip-on lens means you get the desired effect at the highest MP capacity since you are using it with your main lens of the phone camera.

Another advantage of using a clip-on lens is for phones which have a digital zoom and not an optical zoom. Basically, most budget smartphones.

Digital zooming means you are basically cropping the image to get closer to the subject. This degrades the image quality.

So a better option is to buy a telephoto clip-on zoom lens like this one.

Using such a lens would mean you can get a zoomed in shot without having to use digital zoom (cropping). You will be optically going closer to the subject (optical zoom), just like in DSLR or Mirrorless lenses.

Do check out my Mobile Photography Course which teaches you the A to Z of shooting photos and videos with a Smartphone.

I hope this helps you out!