Can a smartphone come anywhere close to DSLRs or mirrorless cameras when it comes to long-distance optical zoom lenses? We’re going find out in this week’s episode of EV Rider.
Related: Apexel TeleCular 20-60x optical zoom lens product page on Amazon
The majority of EV Rider is shot on a Samsung Fold 7. It does a fine job most of the time for the type of work I do. But one area where smartphones fall short is extreme zooms.
For example, I included a video clip in this week’s episode as a sample that was shot at 12x digital zoom, which is the maximum digital zoom my Fold 7 supports when shooting 4k video. As you can see in the video at the top of this post, it’s a blurry, pixelated mess.
That’s why I was excited to try out the Apexel TeleCular 20 to 60x optical zoom lens for smartphones. It screws into a clip that goes over your smartphone’s primary lens. The clip is adjustable to fit a wide range of smartphones. The lens also supports 58mm filters such as UV, CPL and starburst.
I headed to Jacksonville, Florida’s downtown riverfront to try it out.
The video clips in the episode at the top of this post have no post-production enhancements. They were shot using my Samsung’s 8k video setting. To fill the screen and avoid seeing the lens’ outline, I zoomed in the phone’s native lens to approximately 2x, meaning the cropped video you’re seeing in the video is roughly 4k, assuming you have a screen that supports 4k and you have YouTube’s video quality set to 4k or higher.
The lens kit includes a tripod but unless you’ll be shooting on a table or other perch, it’s too short to be useful. It also includes a soft carrying case, lens cap and soft lens cleaning cloth. When not being used as a lens, it can be used as a monocular telescope by screwing on an included eyecup attachment.
When you’re zooming in this much, having a sturdy tripod is critical or you’ll end up with a shaky mess.
The lens has two rings. One is near the smartphone to zoom between 20 and 60x. The other ring is at the front of the lens and manually focuses it.
Getting your shot set up takes patience, but that’s going to be true of most extreme zoom lenses with a manual focus. If you’re thinking this lens will work for capturing spur of the moment stuff like a random bird flying by, it won’t. By the time you get it properly focused, the moment will be over.
But if you’ll be using it for shots you can anticipate, like the boats and other things featured in the video, it works as expected, although it’s not perfect.
The edges of some shots came out blurred and there’s some overall muddiness that’s tough to avoid if you’re not shooting in absolutely perfect conditions.
But from what I’ve seen, the optics on similar zoom lenses in this price class for DSLRs also struggle with details. And of course, with larger sensors and generally better optics, you should expect higher quality from dedicated DSLR OEM lenses.
A zoom lens like this requires patience to get worthwhile shots, but as you can see, it does expand the capability of this Z Fold 7.
A professional photographer or videographer with a dedicated high-end camera with glass costing thousands is not going to be satisfied with the results this lens puts out. With that said, if you’re on a budget, like most of us are, or you want to travel as light as possible, this lens is certainly serviceable.
I also took some 20 to 60x zoom photos with the lens, although I spent the vast majority of my time shooting video.The photos, in my opinion, didn’t turn out as good as the video clips, but then again, still images weren’t my primary concern for this review.
By the way, I paid for this lens with my own money. It is not a review unit. If there’s anything about the lens I didn’t answser, drop me a commeent and I’ll do my best to answer your question.
