Home » Review: The ōlloclip 3-in-1 photo lens for iPhone and iPod Touch

Review: The ōlloclip 3-in-1 photo lens for iPhone and iPod Touch

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The ōlloclip is a handy little lens add-on kit for your iPhone or iPod Touch. The company make a small selection of different options, so you can find the right solution depending on your needs and requirements.

There are three ōlloclip options:

  • The original 3-in-1 ōlloclip:  a macro lens, a fisheye lens and a wide-angle lens
  • The new 4-in-1 ōlloclip:  a fisheye lens, a wide-angle lens and both 10x and 15x macro lenses
  • The telephoto ōlloclip: a telephoto lens option and a circular polarizing lens

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The hardware

We were sent one of the original 3-in-1 ōlloclips to review . The ōlloclip is a very neat little solution. It is compact, versatile, and has a quality feel to it. Two lenses are attached either side of a “corner sleeve” that slides over the corner of your iPhone where the camera is located. To switch between the fisheye and wide-angle lenses you simply slide the ōlloclip off and turn it around. To use the macro lense, you simply set up the wide angle lens and then unscrew the wide angle attachment to expose the macro lens underneath.

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The ōlloclip comes with lens covers to protect the precision ground glass lenses, and you even get a soft little material pouch to keep the little fella in when you aren’t using him. Also in the pack that we got sent was an attachment that lets you use the ōlloclip with an iPod touch. This is simply a thin inner sleeve that fits in between the ōlloclip and the iPod touch.

 

The results

The quality of photos that you can take with an iPhone are getting better and better with each iteration of the phone, but without interchamgeable lenses you will always be somewhat limited with what effects you can produce. The ōlloclip let’s you take a much wider variety of pictures with a number of different effects.

I have provided examples of some photos taken with the different lenses provided on our ōlloclip below. They were all taken by the same iPhone 5s and from the same angle and position. The only difference was the different lenses used. So you can effectively compare what the ōlloclip can do the first picture is a standard photo from the phone without using the ōlloclip at all.

Normal: IMG_2808

Wide-angle: IMG_2806

Fisheye:  IMG_2809

 

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(left: normal iPhone “macro”, right: macro with ōlloclip)

The cost

The ōlloclips do come with a somewhat hefty pricetag – £59.95 RRP for the 3-in-1 and 4-in1 versions and £99.95 RRP for the telephoto version. This does sound very expensive at first, but if you look at it a slightly different way that’s probably cheaper than a half decent point-and-shoot, and means you don’t have to carry around your phone AND and point-and-shoot camera when you go on holiday. It also means that all your photos are immediately on your phone and ready to share with all your friends on Twitter/Facebook when you want to boast about how beautiful the beach is whilst everyone is scraping frost off their cars back home… One slightly less boastful, and potentially more useful advantage is that if you have automatic backing up via iCloud/Dropbox/Flickr/Google+ etc etc etc then you also don’t need to worry about losing all your invaluable holiday snaps if you lose your device whilst you are away (wifi/roaming data connections permitting, of course!).

 

It is worth mentioning that there are different options for iPhone 5/s or iPhone 4/4s due to the different thicknesses of the devices and also the different camera positioning, so make sure you buy the right ōlloclip for the device that you have.

 

Verdict

Overall, we do like the ōlloclip. Whilst I do think it is a shame that they couldn’t make it just a little bit cheaper to encourage the more casual photographers amongst us to give it a go, nevertheless it does provide a good quality solution that lets you get much more out of your iPhone camera.

 

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To find out more about the ōlloclip lenses, visit their website at www.olloclip.com

To see more photos of the ōlloclip, and to see more example photos taken using our review device, check out our Facebook album.

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The ōlloclips are available at a number of retailers in the UK including the online Apple Store. Links provided below:

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