Extend your phone's camera - with a telescope
Focus on this
Mobile phone cameras and digital zooms are becoming more powerful, but sometimes they just don’t cut it when trying to take pictures of, say, the girl next door. So, online retailer Brando has launched an attachable telescope for mobile phones to solve all your distance-viewing problems.
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The kit comprises a 7x magnification telescope, about the same power as a pair of binoculars, that screws onto an adjustable clamp designed to fasten onto the top and bottom of a mobile phone, as the movie above shows.
It fits around camera phones between 91 and 109mm long, which includes Nokia’s N95, and Sony Ericsson’s W810 and K810i. Brando also offers the clamps in a range of six colours, including red and pink.
Taken without the Generic Mobile Phone Telescope (left) and with (right)
A 7x magnified image is then shown on the user’s mobile phone display, from where they can point the lens at anything, or anyone, in the distance and snap away to their heart’s content.
Users adjust the telescope’s focus manually by rotating the lens left or right, in the usual fashion.
The Generic Mobile Phone Telescope is available now from Brando’s website for $22 (£11/€18).
COMMENTS
"Get a real camera"
not only can you get a real camera, but you can get a real camera and then add one of these binoculars to it ;-)
i used my own 10MP DSC N2 to take pics this way.. (3x optical is only OK)..
you can get around the vignette problem to an extent in a nice photo editor.
Optical zoom on an SE K700i
I also used the binocular technique with an SE K700i - the problem with game viewing in Zim is that the animals tend to be rather far away - and dangerous. An American hitch-hiker we picked up (in Zimbabwe, 2005 - lack of food and any transport caught him by surprise) got a nice shot illustrating the set-up.
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=129644&l=0778c&id=720900516
I won't post the photo of said American being "nipped" by a lion. Sorry.
Craptacular
Get a real camera instead. It's not like you save any space by carrying the "lens" attachment around.
Nothing clever
Basically it is just a cheap monocular and a plastic clip to fix it to a phone etc.
As others have pointed out you can get the same effect with any old binoculars you have lying around. Indeed about 25 years ago, long before digital I used a pair of binoculars to add zoom to a 35mm compact camera I had in order to get a shot of a nuclear submarine that surfaced near to where we were sailing. The problem back then was actually getting the subject in the frame as compact film cameras had neither through the lens views or a screen giving the final image. I has some success but the vignetting was as bad then as appears this time.
Why offer it in colors?
You know that the creepy stalker market is only going to be interested in basic semigloss black.
