Finally, my clarifi case arrived.  And so as promised, I did a few experiments… First though, the case itself.

It’s a nice case, a bit too smooth for me which makes me fear I will drop it at some point.  I may place a grip sticker on it. The case comes in two pieces, so install is easy.  Griffin also included a protection screen and a cleaning cloth.  Nice.  Now, on to the images..

When I first started shooting and looking at the images on the iphone, I was disappointed.  It really did not seem to make a difference.  Then I downloaded the images using TouchCopy. Wow, it really did make a difference.  One of the reasons I got this case was because I like to take pics of bottles of wine I like, but I can never get a good shot.  As you can see, the lens made a huge difference, a difference I could not discern on the iphone screen. The main advantage of this lens is for text however, and again, promise delivered. What I would really love to see next is the ability to swap lenses in and out.  I have a feeling we may see this for other phones very soon.

Based on a post from ‘And now all it’s all this‘, seems that the iphone performs best between 2 feet and 5 feet.  When I took pictures of my cat, I tried to get as close as possible while still keeping a clear shot. I was able to get withing 3 inches before it lost focus. The Griffin site specs 4 inches as its nearest point with the macro, 18 inches without.

{update} @hughbaun pointed out that I should include a bit more information on the focal length of the iphone.  A few months back I can across a great article doing a few information real world test. I posted this at the end of this article…

The list price is $34.99, however if you type Macworld2009 in the discount code box, it will knock off $8.75 bringing the price to $26.24.

Each shot is in its ‘raw’ format.  I did not crop nor edit the images.  I also took these by hand, so take the images with a grain of salt. Also, (for you wine people out there) I used BV just because it was handy. 🙂

Normal	Macro Lens

{update}

I read this a few months back and found it useful when I think about shooting with the iphone.  Go to his blog and read the complete article, I fully recommend it. Link here.

So what is my iPhone’s depth of field? I set up a tape measure and a target on a nice sunny day and started shooting pictures at one foot intervals. The target I chose was the book Engineering Properties of Steel by ASM. The cover has a nice mix of fine and bold lines, and the white, blue, and red colors would contrast well with the green that would make up the bulk of the background. Here’s a resized version of one of the photos:

After downloading the photos, I opened them in Preview, set the view to Actual Size, and took several screen captures. The screen captures are done as PNGs so there are no compression artifacts other than those from the camera itself. Here’s the capture for a distance of 1 foot:

Obviously not in focus, but better than I was expecting for being so close. Here the capture for a distance of 2 feet:

This is quite good. Here’s the capture for 5 feet:

This is acceptable, but you can tell that it’s starting to get fuzzy. As you would expect, the photos for 6, 7, and 8 feet got steadily worse, although they weren’t terrible. By 9 and 10 feet, though, I considered the photos out of focus. Here’s 10 feet:

The book is very fuzzy, especially when compared with the grass in the foreground. And you can also see in these last two captures how blurry the fence and the spruce in the background are. They’re about 40′ from the camera.