Reg Hardware

Comments on: Extend your phone's camera - with a telescope

I actually have had one of these for a while 

Posted Wednesday 7th November 2007 16:13 GMT

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ANd they are OK. I find it best to look through with my eye and focus in on what I wish to photograph, and then put iit in the clip and take the picture.

You also need soemwhere to brace your phone and arm.

But for a silly bit of kit, it does all right

Vignetting 

Posted Wednesday 7th November 2007 16:20 GMT

Stop

Seems to suffer a bit from vignetting...

...Oh and maybe you'd look a bit sad taking a call with that strapped to your phone. You could also have someone's eye out with it!

hmmmm... 

Posted Wednesday 7th November 2007 16:21 GMT

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...looks like a complete chunk of shite to me. i could achieve something similar with a milk bottle bottom and some blu-tack.

Hmmm 

Posted Wednesday 7th November 2007 16:31 GMT

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Is this shop legit?

If so I may well get one of these. Spy-scope-tastic!

Nice, but... 

Posted Wednesday 7th November 2007 16:32 GMT

..it doesn't get around the vignette problem that I first encountered doing exactly this with a mates set of binoculars and my old 6280. A reason why I never went to the next step of building anything "grander"

IF they got around that, I'd probably buy one, as it was fun taking long distance shots..

This sounds clever 

Posted Wednesday 7th November 2007 16:43 GMT

Digital zoom blows because it's limited to whatever data is in the original shot and looks like crap when sourced from a 2mp camera, but if I could attach one of these to my Nokia 6288 I might get some decent shots from farther away than two metres.

Anyone tried one yet?

Get a real telescope on it! 

Posted Wednesday 7th November 2007 17:23 GMT

Mars

At the recent lunar eclipse (3rd March) I took this gallery of photos using my Sony K750i camera phone held up to my Meade 12inch aperture LightBridge astronomical telescope. With a focal length of 1.5metres it slightly out classes the little scope above.

http://picasaweb.google.com/torcuill/Eclipse030307

Why offer it in colors? 

Posted Wednesday 7th November 2007 18:29 GMT

You know that the creepy stalker market is only going to be interested in basic semigloss black.

Nothing clever 

Posted Wednesday 7th November 2007 21:38 GMT

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.

Craptacular 

Posted Thursday 8th November 2007 02:58 GMT

Get a real camera instead. It's not like you save any space by carrying the "lens" attachment around.

"Get a real camera" 

Posted Thursday 8th November 2007 08:51 GMT

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 

Posted Thursday 8th November 2007 09:42 GMT

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.