SMALLRIG Cellphone Camera Lens 1.55XT Anamorphic Lens Filmmaking Lens for iPhone 14 13 12 11 and Android, 2.76:1 Widescreen Ratio Imaging and Blue Flares Lens - 3578

Bought on Black Friday for half the price as saw the reviews and was hesitant about buying full price. This is a genuine piece of kit and you have to know a little about filmmaking to get the most out of it. I bought an app called BeastCam (was about £1) which allows the 1.55 desqueeze in real-time (be wary of other apps which only offer 1.33 desqueeze). Results were frankly fantastic even just with the little clip thing on my iPhone 13 Mini. The clip itself is a little fiddly to align with the camera and if you’re thrashing it about in your pocket/bag it can become misaligned, but just treat it as a professional (albeit tiny) bit of filmmaking kit and it’s fine.

I was looking forward to trying this lens but was disappointed by the amount of distortion at the edges on both plains. I know distortion can be adjusted in post but was expecting better from Small Rig.

Great lens. Full of all the anamorphic effects. Use carefully and it will produce great results. I’d love to see an amber/gold flare or even neutral version. Everything’s good except for the 52mm magnetic filter holder. This causes awful vignettes with any filter. The additional 67mm one seems better this should be the one included, not a 52mm version. Also great for photos :)

I'm blown away of how satisfying its. Impressive high definition pictures and videos which I was not able to get with my phone. Comes with little carry bag so you can take it off and safety pack it once you don't need it. Easy to assembly. Very good quality and excellent results

The magnetic design of the front element doesn't make any sense as it makes it impossible to reuse your own other filters. Especially ND filters are absolutely required if you want to control ISO AND shutter speed. I had to glue a 52-67mm adapter to the front element in order to use my filters.Besides that, the edges of the front element, even without stabilisation and without the ND filters, get into the image frame causing a disastrous "vignette effect".If that wasn't enough... I only cleaned the lens ONCE with the included cloth, and the surface finishing got removed and scratched.Extremely poor lens quality. Senseless design whose only purpose is to force you into buying Smallrig filters.Absolutely NOT recommended.

This SMALLRIG Cellphone Camera Lens 1.55XT Anamorphic Lens Filmmaking works really well with my iPhone 12 giving it really good angles and footages. Comes with a small carrying case which is easily accessible and easy to carry around with you. Works well and fits perfectly onto the phone.

The media could not be loaded. The lens on this anamorphic is rectangular so, unlike normal lenses, it needs to be correctly aligned which this is not. The mounting plate fits into the holder, and tried in a SmallRig case, but when fully rotated the magnetic mount is misaligned so when you add the lens itself it does not sit square. The result is you can twist it to get it straight but it's easily knocked back out of alignment and as the video shows once out of alignment the picture slopes. There is also a lot of jelly roll. Useless as you need something like Filmic Pro and that allows you to do anamorphic style videos so the only thing you'll miss is the blue flares.

The media could not be loaded. I was blow away by the videos and photos that a friend was able to achieve with his iPhone 12 Pro and a SmallRig lens. He was using a SmallRig video cage however.I don't own the video cage and have just been using the lens with the bundled vice style clip that grips to the back and the front of the iPhone using a tightening screw at the screen positioned side of the clip.The end result quality of video without the video cage is not quite as good mainly because it is very fiddly to keep the vice style lens clip securely in place when attaching the lens.This isn't a really a big problem for me because I am a very basic amateur photographer and any big issues can usually be cleaned up using a PC/Mac.The usability experience without the cage is though significantly worse and borders on frustrating.It is important to state that the SmallRig recommendation seems to be to use the video cage. I am going to buy a cage but my experience here is based on using the lens with the included lens clip.I have found that fitting the SmallRig lens to my iPhone (iPhone 12 Pro) using the included lens clip is very fiddly and cumbersome.The first problem is lining up the lens clip hole with the iPhone lens. There's a bit of trial and error involved in identifying which of the iPhone lenses is used to shoot video in x1 mode. This took me about ten seconds so no problem there. I fitted the lens clip to the iPhone, ensuring that the lens could be seen clearly through the M-mount hole on the clip. I then screwed the lens into the M-mount and immediately noticed that the clip had shifted during the careful screwing motion.The problem is that it is not possible, certainly with an iPhone screen save fitted, to get enough pressure on the vice grip to prevent the clip from moving when screwing in the lens.It has therefore been necessary, every time I have used the lens, to adjust the clip once the lens has already been fitted. It is difficult see the M-mount hole/aperture with the lens fitted so this has meant using the iPhone screen to make fine adjustments. The attached video shows that this is not always completely successful - shadowing in the left of the video.The other issue that I really don't like is that when the clip is fitted, iPhone Face Unlock usually doesn't work. The SmallRig clip seems to occlude the Face ID scan.The other issue is that the clip covers the default position of the camera app icon on my iPhone screen! This is fairly simple to resolve by moving the app icon but I have also encountered a non responsive touch screen whereby the lens clip's contact with the screen seems to be very occasionally mean that the screen doesn't respond to touches.Positioning the lens clip so that the bottom M-mount hole used - so that the screen side of the clip covers less of the iPhone screen and protrudes above the top of the iPhone - caused another problem: the clip couldn't get a good grip on the phone because the screen side clip was now trying to grab the plastic compressible lip of the iPhone (Belkin) case. There's no way that I am removing the protective case from a device that cost me nearly £1500.These are not criticisms of the lens at all but rather to state that I would much prefer to use this lens with the SmallRig lens cage rather than using the well intentioned bundled clip. Using the clip is very frustrating and so much so that on a number of occasions in the past week, I haven't bothered to use the SmallRig lens despite the fact that it would have produced much better video and photo screen grabs.The quality of the video/picture is very good. Reds and greens are brighter than when using the iPhone's lens on its own. This has allowed me to have more flexibility when colour correcting videos using Final Cut Pro. It also produces strikingly filmic qualities in videos. The effect doesn't really work for photos - which look over saturated - including still frame grabs from videos. Photos can of course be colour corrected using PC/Mac but when using the SmallRig lens for photos/still frame captures there's more need to do edit using PC/Mac.Not everything is perfect. You can see that there is some sort of aberration around the tree in the left of the still picture showing the orange ball. This is fairly rare and is tricky to replicate except in particular circumstances. Again, this could be an issue with correct positioning of the lens clip or due to the fact that I was shooting only in 720p. My friend who owns the SmallRig video cage has said that this is not a common problem.I really do like the fact that a simple twist of the lens body switches in and out of "squeeze" mode. It's great for closeup videos and emphasising a single subject - as well as just being good fun.I can't afford to buy or justify buying a decent and fairly expensive video camera. So I really do like the fact that this lens allows me to produce excellent looking videos by taking advantage of my iPhone hardware and very sophisticated but reasonably priced video shooting and editing software that is available for iPhone/PC/Mac. I have used FiLMic Pro, iMovie, and Final Cut Pro as well as Photoshop for stills and the results are, I think, as good as those that I could achieve as a very basic amateur with a much more expensive video camera.I would strongly recommend this lens, so much so that I am in the process of buying the SmallRig video cage/case in order to make day to day use of the lens an enjoyable experience.