The Sirui Smartphone Wide Angle Lens attaches to your smartphone with a clip, giving your smartphone the flexibility of being able to switch between multiple lenses, like DSLR cameras. But how well does this lens and clip work?
In the box you get the wide angle lens, a lens cleaning cloth, a plastic lens cap, and the mounting clip. The lens also comes with a clear plastic box with an attached aluminum clip, though the box only holds the lens, not the clip. So even if you store the lens in the box, you will still need another container for the clip, and you will also need to manage keeping the two containers together (since one without the other is not useful). The 18mm wide angle lens has optical glass and an aluminum housing. The mounting clip is metal with a metal spring.
The picture shows the lens and clip mounted onto an iPhone 7+. The lens easily attaches to the clip with a bayonet mount. The spring on the clip grips the phone well. Unfortunately, the clip is easy to bump or snag on something, which can move the lens from proper alignment. It can take some time to properly align the Sirui lens with the smartphone lens. Since the Sirui lens is meant to fit onto most any smartphone, aligning the lens on each smartphone is a manual and approximate process each time–there is no precise way to find the correct alignment except through trail and error–you look at the image produced in the smartphone camera app and adjust the clip until you think the resulting image is good enough.
As one comparison picture, you can see a forest scene with and without the Sirui lens. The Sirui wide angle lens does give a wider shot, though the edges of the picture can be blurry.
In another comparison picture, you can see the benefit of the wide angle lens versus the smartphone’s lens by comparing the increased section of fence displayed. In fact, in the wide angle shot you can even see part of a trailer in the background on the right-hand side that was missed with just the smartphone’s lens.
The company also makes portrait, fisheye, and macro lenses that each fit into the same clip mount. I will also note that you can use this lens in selfie-mode–selfies with different lenses!–an option not found in some other smartphone lens mounting systems. And this lens can also be used in video mode, though the way the clip sticks out may prevent you from using a gimbal. All in all, the Sirui Smartphone Wide Angle Lens works reasonably well and might be a good addition for the casual user who wants to experiment with different lens effects on their smartphone. However, though this lens and clip mount is definitely not a toy, the more serious photographer may find this smartphone lens system to be too fiddly (it takes valuable time to line up the lens each time you change lenses) and leading to too much photo quality variability across shots, especially since the lens is so easily bumped out of place. But for the price, this lens system is a good way to add the ability to switch between high-quality lenses that work for most smartphones.
- Pricing and Availability on Amazon: Sirui Smartphone Wide Angle Lens
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