I recently bought the Apexel 100X Mini Microscope for smartphones on Amazon, but unfortunately, I’m not convinced by its performance. Although the lens is supposed to fit any smartphone, its bulky size makes it difficult to install correctly. Additionally, the image quality is not up to my expectations. The edges of the image are blurry, which impairs the clarity of details.
Another negative point is that to take a sharp photo, it’s necessary to get very close to the subject, about 2 or 3 millimeters, which makes taking photos difficult, especially if the subject is in motion, as is the case with insects.
Finally, the price of about 35 euros without shipping costs is high compared to the quality of the lens. For this price, I would have hoped for more convincing results. Overall, I do not recommend the Apexel 100X Mini Microscope for smartphones because the image quality is mediocre, and it’s difficult to use, even for an experienced photographer. It’s better to look for other higher-quality alternatives.
Thanks for directing me to this thread. This seemed like a topic that other people would obviously have said stuff about but I just couldn’t find anything in a search for whatever reason.
That said, this is about magnifiers; should I make a separate thread for telephoto lenses?
But I think taking photos through binoculars is better overall in terms of quality for price. I usually already have binoculars on me whenever I’d want to take telephoto pictures.
I have binoculars but I’ve found it horribly inconvenient because if I as much as move my phone a tiny bit off from the exposure of one of the scopes the picture disappears out of view. And I have to realign this for every single picture.
If you’ve got some binoculars that work well for this purpose, please do feel free to suggest them.
Feel free to change the title, if there’s no existing topic for telephoto lenses. I think I tried looking as well but couldn’t find one.
Given that telephoto and macro lenses are sold together pretty often, it makes sense I guess.
I guess I’ve just gotten pretty used to taking pictures through binoculars and microscopes. I just use a small Tasco (#168RB) that was lying around. I hold the binoculars sideways so both lenses are firmly held against the back of my phone. It takes a little getting used to, but I think it’s fairly easy to hold my phone and the binoculars while also having a free thumb to focus and take photos.
Hi all, for City nature challenge in my city, I’m considering to help local organizers by organizing an insect-centric walk. I’ve noticed some dirt-cheap macro lenses for smartphone - cheap enough (1-2EUR) that they could be given out to the participants of the walk which might improve their experience a lot. The shipping from China is typically much more than the lens cost itself which makes ordering many different types and testing them impractical. Does anybody have experience with such extremely cheap lenses? Are they still usable? Thanks!
There is a big difference between the cheapest lenses and the more expensive ones. The cheapest ones I´ve bought were simply unusable. In addition - to hand out to public wouldn´t work I think as most phone models require different lenses.
Or I guess there are the “universal” cheap ones…but I think those I tried were the least useful.
I preferred just holding a loupe in front of the phone - and this is what I offered to students at the time. But on the newer iphones that´s also difficult as the lenses automatically change depending on distance to object or whatever…
My experience is that some cheap clip-on lenses work great with some phones. The optics of the phone’s camera lens and the thickness of the phone case seem to factor into whether a particular combination will work well. I’ve had cheap ones that worked great on my phone, and premium ones that didn’t work at all, but did work on someone else’s phone. Given how cheap shipping is from sites like AliExpress or Temu, it might be worth just ordering a variety of lenses and trying them on a variety of your friends/colleagues’ phones. Note that any given lens may be sold under several “brand” names, so try ordering a few types that look physically different.
I used several macro lenses and small microscopes to look at insects and other animals or plants, fungi, They are cheaper and easier to carry than camera lenses, and although they don’t show as much detail as camera lenses, they are enough to identify species.
I tried a Macrolens with about the same name but it looked different. I also was not happy with the results and returned the lens. The attachement of the lens to the phone was made with a clip and not with a pin, which made it difficult to move the lens to the correct telefonelens. Normally it take a few seconds but this clip took minutes to make it work correctly. Very sad cause I liked the build-in lights…
As a few others, I use the moment 10x macro lens (145€) with a case (55€)
The images I can get are quite good (but usually no comparison to images shot with an actual camera + macro lens).
I have a few issues with Moment. Apart the shipping being a nightmare (being pestered by FedEx about product information I didn’t have, Moment’s Customer Service refusing to give me that information by ignoring me entirely, the product arriving about 1.5 months too late, and then being billed additional shipping costs (70€) which were not to be found anywhere on the Moment website), the quality of the case I got is also very bad for its price.
In the past I have gotten very good results by simply using a 5€ botany loupe which I have manually held in front of the lens (the metal flippy thing helps a lot for that).
All in all, I would recommend going the loupe-route over the moment route unless you are really into macro-photography (at which point you could probably justify to get an actual camera?). But having a loupe is never not useful.
Moment can get you better images definitely, but is it worth 190€ (260€)? Probably not
To fix some of the lighting issues, I have very recently acquired a small video light (SmallRig RM01 - 30€) and a tiny tripod (no name - 6€) and so far I am very happy with them.
The light is rechargeable via USB-C and has a good battery life. It has 4 brightness levels, the brightest of which is very bright. It also comes with a lot of stuff, including a diffuser. Most importantly it is just about (3.5 cm)³ and not too heavy, so it’s very portable.
How do you find the moment in comparison to the loupe in terms of usability? I have a big jewellers loupe from aliexpress, and the moment lens, and the working distance/minimum focus distance is double that of the moment lens.
Considering as well that the moment lens can’t be used as a ‘normal’ loupe, I’m thinking to just sell the moment lens, and stick to the normal loupe…
The usability of Moment’s macro lens is better as it gives you the option to shoot with one hand, leaving the other hand free to hold a light, for example. And also, there is no danger of accidentally misaligning the moment lens with the phone camera.
But as I said above, I do not think it is necessarily worth all that extra money. In my case, I could and should have just spent 40€ more for a used Olympus TG-6. Or for a macro lens for my “old” Nikon D3100…
That being said, now that I do have it, I have no intentions of going back to the loupe.
