Is the Oowa the best iPhone lens so far?
SINGAPORE -- Another day, another player in the iPhone clip-on lens game. But one Singaporean startup took more than three years to perfect its premium lens, and it's ready to show us what has taken so long.
At the heart of DynaOptics' design is its oval lens. It's rotationally asymmetrical -- which the company says is a first for a mobile phone lens.
Asymmetrical lenses have been used in specialty photography for decades, and are often touted as providing better edge-to-edge sharpness by "fitting" over the image sensor, or film.
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Using this principle, DynaOptics claims its new Oowa lens' oval shape matches the iPhone's rectangular sensor better, thereby producing a clearer and more distortion-free picture.
That's the idea, at least. But it's expensive and complicated to manufacture, said DynaOptics co-founder and CEO Li Han Chan, who dropped by Mashable's office to give us a test run.
It's expensive and complicated to manufacture.
Imagine a potter's wheel. Making a rotationally symmetrical lens means the cutter drops down to a fixed point as the lens beneath is rotated. But cutting an asymmetrical lens requires far more precision in where and when the cutter is applied to the glass.
Chan said 80% of the company's effort has been in developing the machining software platform to make its mobile lenses at scale and reliably.
More than three years later, DynaOptics has finally got its clip-on, and it's trying to bring the Oowa set to life on Kickstarter -- the same platform that helped launch Oowa's main competitor, Moment.
A week into its Kickstarter campaign, the Oowa is closer to a reality, with more than $46K pledged toward its $50K goal.
For now, the lens will only be available for iPhones, because it is mapped onto the iPhone's sensor for better image quality, Chan said.
We tested three lens clip-ons, and here's what we found
Mashable tested the Oowa's 2.5x zoom lens against three others: A generic competitor, the Olloclip and the Moment.
Here's a photo taken on an iPhone 6S with no lens attached.
Here's a close-up on that same test pattern photo using a $30 no-brand lens. The edges are horribly warped, and show colours separating on the test pattern.
Here's the Olloclip test. We see slight warping and obvious softness at the corners, but it's better than the no-brand lens.
And here's the test using the Moment. This one maintains a relatively distortion-free image and is sharper at the edges than the Olloclip, but blurriness is still visible. No colour bleeding on the corner dots.
Lastly, the Oowa. The test pattern is distortion-free, as with the Moment, but is sharper at the edges, and the borders of the black dots are crisp.
Close-ups
Here's a 100% crop of the corner of the no-brand lens, showing red and blue colours bleeding into the dot because the lens isn't focusing the light properly on the spot.
This is from the Olloclip. The circle's shape is maintained, but you can see slight bleeding of reds and blues in either corner.
Here's a crop of the Moment's shot. You get some colour bleeding still, while the shot is relatively sharp in the corners.
Finally, the Oowa's crop. All black, no colour bleeding, and clean borders indicating a sharp shot.
Tests like these matter, because in real life, away from test patterns, bleeding colors can do some nasty things to your pictures.
In the shot of the trees below, taken with an unnamed competitor's lens, you can see purple fringing -- also known as chromatic aberration -- around the edges of the leaves. It's caused by the lens failing to focus the different wavelengths of light on one spot, resulting in some colours being exposed separately.
DynaOptics wants to give your future phone built-in optical zoom
It's worth noting that Dynaoptics didn't start out making lens clip-ons. Nearly four years ago, Chan and co-founder and CTO Kelvin Cheo pitched the idea to build optical zoom directly into mobile phone lenses. They want to do this using Alvarez lens technology, creating lenses that can move sideways instead of in and out, to accommodate the flat-phone form factor.
It's a lofty goal, and the team needed to prove to investors that they could do this at scale.
"So the Kickstarter [for the Oowa clip-on] is a showcase of what we can do, and will provide some early revenue for the team," Chan said.
The lens clip-on scene is fairly niche, appealing to "iPhoneographers" who want just a little more from mobile phone photography than the average consumer. Entering this market pits the Oowa against popular contenders like Moment and the Olloclip, with new premium lenses likes Fellowes' Exolens, which just came out with Zeiss clip-ons for the iPhone.
Chan admitted that it's a bit of a gamble committing the Oowa to the current 1/3" sensor that the iPhone has been using since the iPhone 5S. However, she said the sensor is "not likely" to change for a while, at least not in the forthcoming iPhone 7, so the Oowa should have reasonable longevity in the market.
The Oowa will retail for $85 for either the wide angle or zoom lens, or $150 for the set of both. By comparison, the Moment sells for $180 on Apple, and the Olloclip is listed at $80. The Exolens is on Amazon at $100 for one lens, or $130 for two.
But you might see optical zoom becoming native in phones over the next couple of years. DynaOptics is currently in conversation with phone makers in China, and is targeting an early 2018 rollout of a built-in mobile lens. If you want the Oowa's benefits without the need for an accessory, you'll just have to wait.
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Topics iPhone
Victoria Ho is Mashable's Asia Editor, based in Singapore. She previously reported on news and tech at The Business Times, TechCrunch and ZDNet. When she isn't writing, she's making music with her band
