I went crazy last week and spent a whopping £4.99 on a whim in my local petrol station on this universal camera lens and still somehow managed to feel hard done by.

I am starting to think that buying very cheap accessories is a waste of money almost every time because they are designed to catch your eye by looking ‘similar’ to their more expensive competition and then make you feel stingy if you wanted to return them.

In this case you get a macro lens that doesn’t offer a strength rating and a fish-eye lens that if a fish-eye lens so of no use at all to anyone who wants to take a photo that doesn’t look silly.

My first problem was that the lens, when attached, creates a dark circle around the resulting image which is not great. The iPhone SE lens is harding big and so I am expecting it to do this on any phone. It isn’t the end of the world, however, if you need to capture close-ups from distances that your phone cannot normally handle because you can crop them later, but the macro needs to be useable.

I found that any movement of any kind was enough to cause blurring and after almost 20 attempts I managed to get a half-decent shot. The problem, however, is that I could have taken the shot from a longer distance, cropped it further, and saved myself a lot of frustration at the same time.

As someone who does not understand photography in any detail, I am presuming that attaching any strong macro lens to a phone will cause this problem because there is no way the phone knows it is there. Ultimately, you end up trying to control something that is close to uncontrollable and have to rely on luck to capture the photo you need. And if you decided to put more serious money down for a lens that works on its own and can still attach to your phone, you may as well buy a decent camera anyway.

There may be some benefit in this pack of lenses for some people, but the reality is that they feel like a novelty and one that feels designed to take a few pounds from you and not actually work in the real world. If you have examples of lenses that work with your phone, I would love to be proved wrong.

Taken by iPhone SE from too close a distance to gain any focus

Taken by iPhone SE from same distance as previous shot – still not great

You may as well dispense with the lens and just snap a photo using a little patience

Of you could use a fish-eye lens and screw the whole thing up

Categories: Photography, Product Reviews