Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/12/16/review-moment-58mm-tele-smart.html
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I was once relieved to discover that the Sony RX100 III with a dead battery works fine when plugged into an external battery. Otherwise a day of hiking in a wildflower wilderness would have gone undocumented. I always carry the battery and a collection of cords (USB-C, Lightning, micro-USB) when away from civilization.
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That’s some picture. Really, really nice.
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Well, that was a huge waste of my time. I was really excited about it as a possible gift for my wife, but apparently they only made a handful of them and it’s out of stock everywhere.
Not a tele
58mm is not tele
Sorry I know this comment is lame but confusing the market with this naming structure is the most lame
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@SeamusBellamy question: if you have a single lens phone (Samsung Galaxy S8 to be precise) is there any win to having this over their current 60mm lens?
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Isnt this really a magnifier??
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Future proofing is my only thought, since it’s very likely that all flagship phones will stay multi-lens, and mid-range phones will switch to multi-lens in a generation or two. Since the idea is that a Moment lens is an investment, with one lens serving multiple smartphones, looking to the future is a good idea.
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This lens + the phone end up at around the same thickness as the RX100 camera, with 20% the image sensor size. I suppose if one leaves the lens off except when special shooting opportunities come along it might make sense, but then how do you keep from losing the lens?
Added:
one lens serving multiple smartphones
As long as the special Moment phone case fits on all of them.
Sensor size? Irrelevant for 99.9% of the pictures being snapped today.
A person always has their phone with them, and carrying around an extra lens is going to be easier than carrying a phone and a camera. And the phone has the advantage of apps and instant online sharing. The camera is also another dev8ce that needs to be charged.
I dont see it as an x vs y issue, its more about the right tool for the need.
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Especially if you don’t care about color quality or sharpness, but then probably a separate 6-element lens made of “aluminum grade metal” (whatever that is) is also irrelevant.
But the idea of this lens is that it screws into a special mount on their special phone back. I doubt people will want to always have this lens mounted on their phone, and with it dismounted what you have is a thicker phone and an extra easy-to-lose separate thing to carry around.
It’s a confusing issue, and you are actually making it more confusing yourself, as I am also about to do. You forgot to say “an equivalent to a 58mm lens on full frame camera view is not telephoto lens.” In fact, an actual 58mm lens on a small sensor camera can be a telephoto. But Moment really confuse the issue by calling their converter a 58mm lens when it is no such thing since the actual equivalence will depend on the angle of view of the lens this adapter is put over.
Agreed. Place 10 different monitors/phones/prints side by side and they will all have varying degrees of tone and sharpness.
But phone cameras have always been lacking a nice zoom function and this product may actually help that for the right person.
I’m not the target consumer either, but my main thought was that the comparisons between a phone and a camera is more suited towards usage comparisons instead of hardware comparisons.
I think people are generally confused about the market for this sort of thing, and I was too, until I became the market.
I have a film SLR I’ve been using to develop my photog skills. It’s great. I bought a bucket of lenses at a bargain price. But I find I can’t have a camera with me 90% of the time, though I do generally have a backpack or messenger bag and can fit a couple of lenses in so that when the moment arises I can use the best camera for that situation: The camera I actually have.
I don’t disagree that a camera that you have with you all the time is better than one you leave at home. This lens doesn’t seem like a solution: you won’t leave it on because that makes the camera bulky (in a potentially fragile way), and if you just carry it around separately then you’re in the same boat as having two devices, except less convenient (since you have to reassemble it for use), easier to lose, with worse results.
For around the same price you can get a used Sony DSC-W800 or Lumix-XS1 in good condition; if you rubber-band this to your phone it will actually take up less room than the Moment lens.
Honestly, if someone built a passable GSM voice phone into a bridge camera, that would be a winner for me.
I think the use case for these lenses at their price point is fairly limited. The $100 for a bulky 2x telephoto converter that requires a special adapter case is probably better spent as money towards a cell phone with a multi-lens camera - because that is something you will have with you, more so than a kit of accessory lenses. Also, I haven’t seen side by side comparisons of this 2x adapter compared to digital zoom - optical adapters, even well made ones, introduce optical aberrations, so the net gain in quality over digital zoom may be minimal, or at least, not $100 worth.
Digital zoom is always a massive drop in resolution. Optical abberations are at least data that you can correct in post-processing. Digital zoom represents data loss, and there’s fuck all you can do about it.There’s actually very little point in even attempting digital zoom, since it’s essentially just a native crop feature in your device. Even abberations in your images are never so bad that you lose effective resolution, unless you get really bad vignetting, but I haven’t experienced that.
I’d say that optical aberrations are also data loss, analog data loss. Only some optical aberration can be corrected computationally, and often only if you have a proper lens profile. So some vignetting, geometric distortion and chromatic aberration can be corrected, but the rest, such as optical resolution, not so much. And Adobe Lightroom does not have a lens correction profile for this add on combined with a cell phone camera - not sure if anyone does or, if so, how effective it is. Again, this is why I’d like to see side by side comparisons to compare the analog “data loss” to the digital zoom.
I have to say, I really don’t understand this need. Optical zoom is so obviously worse to my eye that I can’t imagine a universe where it’s better unless you’re fundamentally trying for a different photograph. But I’ll bite. I have a macro lens for cellphones that’s really not very good, when I get a chance today or later tomorrow, I can conduct a quick experiment either zooming in on an object or taking a close up with a cheap macro lens. There will be distortions that you can’t fix in post-processing, I’ll even pick a subject that will make these distortions super obvious, but I think I can prove digital zoom is inferior.
Cell phones are already pretty good at macro due to their small sensor size. What I’m interested in seeing is the lens Seamus Bellamy is touting vs digital zoom. I think the lens should give better performance than the digital zoom, but I don’t think it will be as much better as many would assume.
