Review: Magnetic macro lens for HTC EVO 4G
The HTC EVO's 8-megapixel rear camera can produce some pretty outstanding close-up pictures (I think this one is particularly impressive), but it isn't capable of taking true macros.
Not without help, that is.
Enter the magnet-mounted macro lens designed for cell phones and digital cameras. There are several different brands and types of these lenses available on Amazon
, eBay, and other places, and while they look comical when attached to the EVO's rear camera, they make a significant difference in macro image quality.
The lens I have is a wide/macro combination that can be separated so that the macro lens can be used alone, but I believe there are macro-only lenses out there too.
This lens comes with a plastic cap for the larger wide angle lens, two metal rings that can be affixed to devices that don't havemagnetic material around their lenses, and a powerful magnetic cover attached to a short lanyard to protect the bottom of the lens.
Without using one of the metal rings, which I refused to do since it looks terrible, the wide angle lens falls off the EVO (it's too heavy), which makes it useless unless you want to hold it in place when snapping a picture.
The macro lens, on the other hand, will stay in place if you don't jostle it around too much.
There's no "trick" to using the lens. Just get close to your subject, wait for it to focus, press the shutter button, and voila! Look at this unaltered picture of a penny I took using the lens:
Here are some additional samples I took to illustrate how much better macro photos can be with a magnetic macro lens.
In the following set:
- The top photo is the best possible close-up I could take with the EVO's rear camera.
- The middle photo is an attempted macro shot taken without the macro lens.
- The bottom photo is taken with the macro lens from the same distance as the previous attempt.
In the next set of images, both photos were taken from the same distance away from the subject. The top pictures are obviously the ones taken without the macro lens.
All the images were taken with the HTC EVO 4G (default camera settings only) and have not been altered. The only things I did to the 8-megapixel unedited images were resize and watermark them, so if anything, the quality you see above is degraded.
The macro images aren't perfect, sure, but considering that they were taken with nothing more than the HTC EVO 4G and a small magnetic macro lens, I'd say they're pretty amazing.
