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back to article Extend your phone's camera - with a telescope

Mobile phone cameras and digital zooms are becoming more powerful, but sometimes they just don’t cut it when trying to take pictures of, say, the girl next door. So, online retailer Brando has launched an attachable telescope for mobile phones to solve all your distance-viewing problems. No video? You'll need to download …

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  1. Saucerhead Tharpe
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    I actually have had one of these for a while

    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

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  2. Nev
    Stop

    Vignetting

    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!

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  3. andy rock
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    hmmmm...

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

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  4. A. Lewis
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    Hmmm

    Is this shop legit?

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

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  5. Tony Barnes

    Nice, but...

    ..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..

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  6. Sean Aaron

    This sounds clever

    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?

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  8. Mike Powers

    Why offer it in colors?

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

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  9. Tim Greenwood

    Nothing clever

    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.

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  10. Tim Bates

    Craptacular

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

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  11. fergal

    "Get a real camera"

    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.

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  12. mike

    Optical zoom on an SE K700i

    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.

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