Cool toy or usefull? Beastgrip

Stumbled over this seemingly cool thing to enhance smartphone camera use: http://beastgrip.com/

Are there any lenses for the Fairphone out there?

If this costs me $260, why would I want to use my inferior phone CCD (chips that registers the image) instead of a proper SLR camera? Besides, using this means I can’t be called anymore, so you’d need a 2nd phone. Add that to the price, hmm :slight_smile:

This seems more practical and affordable:

Actually, I don’t think that all smarphone CCDs are inferior to all SLR chips. What’s mostly lacking in smartphones is the physical space for proper lenses. And that is exactly what that thing provides.

Why would that be? It looks as if the phone is easy to insert and to remove. And you could even use headphones to call while it is in the rig.

The photojojo solves a similar problem but not the same: It is only a lense.

So if you have a phone with a good camera and want to use it to shoot video, you can get going without spending thousands. It is definitely not as good as a professional camera setup, but also much cheaper since you have the camera already :wink:

Edit: I would not buy this thing in any case, but I would definitely not buy it for my FP1. The camera of it is just not worth spending that much money for it.

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The thing is, the one thing a phone camera has going for it is that it’s compact and integrated into a device you’re already carrying. If you take this beastgrip with you, both advantages are gone.

When you take it with you, it’s probably because you explicitly want to take high quality pictures. I’d prefer going the extra mile and just take a SLR camera with me. Consumer level cameras like the Canon EOS x00D line is affordable and shoots much better pictures than most phones.

I’m also not convinced that it is practical to have your phone embedded in a device, no matter how accessible. It still means that operating the phone is still cumbersome, or you’ll have to continually put it in/take it out.

Maybe I’m a bitter skeptic here, but if you want to produce awesome looking pictures, then why try to upgrade a phone into something resembling an awesome-picture-maker rather than bring something along that was engineered and built from the ground up to make awesome pictures?

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