Samsung Galaxy Accessories That Are A Total Waste Of Money – SlashGear

Smartphone camera technology has come a long way in a relatively short period of time, and Samsung is no exception. The company not only sells high-end Android smartphones under its Galaxy S and Galaxy Z lines, but it also manufactures mobile camera hardware, including the ridiculously pixel-dense ISOCELL HP3 sensor. A camera sensor is only part of the equation, however, as optical glass plays just as important of a role in the quality of an image or video, particularly if you want to record or capture something at a distance.

Clip-on lenses used to be a popular option for augmenting the camera built into a smartphone; they come in multiple varieties, including fisheye, telephoto, and macro. A telephoto clip-on lens can, for example, offer optical zoom for capturing far-away subjects, while a fisheye lens is essentially an ultra-wide lens that can be used to capture tight spaces. Back when smartphones only had a single camera paired with an unremarkable lens, these accessories proved marginally useful. Now that most handsets have two or more rear cameras, they’re largely a waste of money.

The Galaxy S22 Ultra, for example, has a 108-megapixel wide-angle lens on the back, as well as a 12-megapixel ultra-wide lens and two telephoto cameras — not to mention the Space Zoom “super resolution” option. There’s no reason to use a clip-on lens with a phone’s camera if the phone already packs multiple different high-quality lenses. Even in cases where there are only one or two cameras, computational photography like in Google’s Pixel phones can often simulate different types of lenses (like fisheye) within seconds at the software level. In comparison, clip-on lenses may create image distortions and light leaks due to poor fit or construction, making images worse instead.