I love my iPhone and I love taking photos with it. The ease of use, the speed, the beautiful quality and the great photo editing apps like Enlight make the iPhone a badass tech. But no matter how amazing the camera is, it still has such a small sensor that can do only that much.
MPOW comes to our "rescue" with its iPhone or better say, Mobile Camera Lenses. Now I have been intrigued by the concept behind these lenses, but every time I came close to actually order them, I didn't in the end cause their presentation on the store page seemed like a hoax if that makes any sense. However I ordered the MPOWs and well, I was mostly surprised by what these lenses delivered.
It is a 3 in 1 package deal, inside the box you get a Wide Angle lens, a Macro one and a Fisheye lens. It was pleasing to find out that all three deliver on what they are supposed to do. Let's start with the Wide Angle one.
"Installing" it on the iPhone is as easy as it gets, clip it over the camera, move it slightly to find the center and you are set. The difference is clearly visible, what you are able to capture is wider and bigger with no loss to the overall quality of the image. Sure there is the problem of the lens distortion where the straight lines are a little messed as you can see in the examples down here so you have to keep that in you mind.
Next, the Macro lens. Now when you think of Macro photography, if you know what that actually is, the first photos or images that come to mind are the close-up of the eye of a fly or another insect. These photos are taken using expensive DSLR cameras with even more expensive lenses, so expecting the same result with an ultra cheap iPhone lens is borderline crazy. However the end results, as you can see the photos below, are more than surprising. Finding the right subject, finding the right focus point and finding the right way to hold it so the light can pass through the transparent ring, which by the way require a ton of patience and tries, are a must if you want a "true" macro shot. Even then, most of the photos have this weird halo of "out-of-focus-light" plus a lot of noise that if you do not use an editing app to remove, are unusable.
And last, the Fisheye lens. Skaters made this lens cool back in the 90's, ollies and grinding rails looked cool in that format for some reason. This lens creates that same effect. Since the lens does all the magic, what you get is a true 180 degree field of view, but is there a reason why you would want to use it? I don't know a scenario where I would want to use it, the photo produced is good but it is useless. Yes it captures a lot, but who cares? However if you switch it and use it on the front camera, what you get is interesting. Facetiming or Skyping is great since you can fit everybody in the frame if your family is large enough. This is what I think the guys at MPOW had in mind for this lens, seeing also how it's built. Unlike the two other lenses, this doesn't really have a rubber padding to create a space between the phone camera and its body. When you use clip it on the back camera, the lens sits on top of the camera glass, this is risky since movements may scratch the camera and you definitely don't want that. This problem disappear if you use it on the front camera, the lens sits snuggly with no risk of scratching.
So to sum it up, what you get for around $25 is a great Wide Angle Lens, a easy to use/ hard to master Macro Lens and a useless/useful Fisheye one. I tested them on an iPhone 4, iPhone 6, LG G3 and Samsung S6, so I can assume that they work with pretty much every phone out there right now. The photo examples should give you a pretty idea of what to expect, but the most important thing to keep in mind is that they do actually work as advertised. Order your now by clicking here. Thanks for reading!
