Moment Lens on Camera Phones! Useful? Or Gimmick? By Potato Jet

- Welcome to Las Vegas. Wow, this lighting is absolutely terrible, look at this. Now this is a pretty common lighting scenario because people go oh look at this nice view. Take a picture of me in front of this window and they're just like completely dark like this. I need some sort of balance because all the lighting's coming in this way. I just need like this towel here, look at this.

Boom, I got a little bit of lighting on me. All that lighting is coming in from there, bouncin' back on my face but we don't need that right now. Inside this adorable little satchel is a little lens for your camera phone. Now these lenses are made by a company called Moment and you've probably heard of them. They're kinda the leaders in the phone lens world.

Okay, will this work on here? Can I just put this in front of my lens? Not really. Not this video isn't sponsored by Moment or anything but to be honest the first time I heard about these high-end lenses for your camera phone I thought it was kinda of a little bit of a gimmick. I mean my thought was why don't you just get an actual camera? But I've been playing with these lenses during this trip and I actually kind of like them and the main reason is because this camera may not be as powerful as a camera like this EOS R that I'm filming on right now but it's smarter. So check this out. If I try to expose me, this background totally blown out and then if I expose the background I'm in the shadow again.

So with a scene like this I would definitely want to maximize the performance out this camera so I would definitely switch to C log. So there we go, that looks a little bit nice and flat. We're getting a little bit more dynamic range performance but I have to go in and manually color grade my levels to go up a little bit and that to be down a little bit so the separation doesn't seem as intense. A camera like this, always gonna be more powerful than your camera phone but this on the other hand, it's a lot smarter. So right out of the camera, look at that.

That's not bad right? And notice that it does a lot of the work for you automatically. Like I haven't even touched the settings, this is just straight out of the camera and it looks like it has more dynamic range than standard on this camera, 'cause look at this. On standard the sky just looks totally blown out and I'm totally in the dark but the phone does a little bit of a better job at just balancing it in its smart features. It's not because the sensor or the lenses on it's better, it's just smarter. So the beauty of shooting on your phone is the convenience of it and also since the processing is done in the phone it doesn't have to save a giant file size.

On the EOS R I'm shooting on a flat picture profile on a pretty big file so that I can go in and color grade it later and have that flexibility but since the phone is pretty good and smart about color grading it just right here in the phone when it saves it, it can save it at a much smaller file size and still have that dynamic range information. So sure this EOS R better, but convenience wise this phone's pretty good and the smarter phones get the more it makes sense to have some lenses for these phones. All right, so for my iPhone XS Max I got the 18mm which is a wide angle lens and then the 58mm lens, which is much tighter, it's gonna be more like a zoomed in lens and an anamorphic lens. So let's start off with my personal favorite, the 18mm wide angle lens. I always felt like the camera phone was a little bit too zoomed in so it looks good if you're standing still and filming other people but if you wanted to move around, vlog, and do all that stuff it was a little bit too tight for that.

And our newer phones are starting to come with these super wide angle lenses built in and the new iPhone looks like it's gonna have three lenses so one of those is probably gonna be a super wide angle lens so that's great that that's already just built in. But for the rest of us, I think this 18mm wide angle is probably the most useful. Next up is the 58mm which zooms in my shot, and I already have a zoomed in lens on my iPhone XS Max but the wide angle lens has an F stop of 1.8 which is gonna give me better low light performance so it's nice to be able to throw it on your standard lens but you could also throw it on your telephoto lens and that's gonna give you extra zoom on top of your zoom lens. So if you're gonna go to a concert or a sports game or anything where you're seated far back, this is a good option. And then of course there's the anamorphic lens which I'm actually having a ton of fun with.

Now in case you're not familiar with anamorphic lenses it basically takes your image and squeezes it in then afterwards you can take that image and stretch it back out, and what's the point of that? You get that super widescreen image and yeah you can fake that look by cropping off the top and bottom of your picture but then you're just slicing into your image. You're not utilizing your full sensor and you're gonna be cropped in further than you might want to but the beauty of anamorphics is that it maintains your entire height of your image and just pulls in extra information from the size. So instead of just slicing off parts of your image you're literally gathering more. And when you start shooting anamorphic everything feels so good and everything just feels very grand. I can't really explain it but it just does and aside from the obvious widescreen look it also gives it this certain characteristic which is always tough to describe with anamorphic lenses.

I think it comes down more to the way the footage feels because we've seen so many movies and cinema that's been shot with anamorphics. And of course, if you're into the flares then shine a flashlight at it. Now it's not that difficult to shoot it squeezed and then just de-squeeze it in post-production but if you wanna skip that step then shoot with the Moment app. And I actually love this Moment app 'cause not only does it let you de-squeeze your anamorphic shots but it gives you full control over the camera. You can monitor your audio levels, your histogram, and you could actually dial in your ISO and know exactly what the camera is doing so that's pretty cool.

It also gives you a flat and log profile, which is nice in case you want to color grade yourself and you can manually switch between your standard lens and your telephoto lens. So that's a feature we don't get with the standard camera apps. Hello Kari. - Hi. (giggles) - We're indulging with fancy stuff like room service right now 'cause Kari just won us a ton of money in poker! Look at how much money Kari won! Look at this! This is a lot of money! This is how much we buy in with right and I left with about this much and ya know still kinda learning so I think that was pretty good.

I didn't lose everything. Kari went in with the same amount and literally destroyed like four people on the table. It was really great just watching all these grown-ass men just get destroyed by Kari. If you guys are poker players and ever happen to see Kari at a casino just (screams) run! Look at this one, this one's $100. - Yep.

- This is $100 chip in here. Kari I don't know what you're doin' as a teacher. All right so now we're back in LA and I'm actually liking it more and more. One little thing I like about it is that you can put the anamorphic lens on either your regular lens or your telephoto so it's kinda having like two lenses that are anamorphic with this thing and then I got the Movi Cinema Robot right here which you can get some counter balances like I have on here so that you can take your lenses and it'll balance out okay and it actually pushes the lens out this way you can see because with a wider angle a lot of times it can see the motor right here. So that's why the phone has to be pushed out that way.

But this combination is definitely really cool. I mean you just turn it on and you have an anamorphic gimbal stable shot. How cool is that? - I love your reviews. - Hey, thank you. (laughing) It's worth mentioning that the iPhone is really smart but it's not perfect.

Like in this shot it's a little bit confused about how to balance out the image and sand skin tones just look kinda messed up. So the beauty of professional cameras are that they're dumb, they don't do anything on their own so it's very predictable how the image is gonna come out and of course I have a ton more flexibility with my EOS R. So my mirrorless cameras and DSLRs, not goin' anywhere. And I also heard that Moment made some lenses for the DJI Maverick Pro so that would actually be really cool. I was filming a whole bunch of drone footage while we were at Red Rock Canyon and man if I had an anamorphic lens on the front of that, that would've been so cool.

So hopefully I'll get my hands on one soon enough and go test it out 'cause that's pretty exciting. Now I definitely went into this a little bit skeptical about the whole putting a lens on a camera phone but I actually am starting to see the value of it. It is super convenient because your phone is always charged and ready to go so if you're heading out the door and all you have to do is grab this thing, then you're good to go. In a lot of cases I think this can replace a point-shoot-camera because yeah they're very compact and portable too but again you have to make sure there's a memory card in there that has space and has a battery charge on there. Certain point-and-shoot cameras like the ones with a one-inch sensor like the G7 X, they still have their advantages with that bigger sensor and they're really good in low light compared to a phone but if I'm going out and I know it's going to be bright on a sunny day then I might just take this with me.

And I asked you guys on Instagram what you guys thought of lenses on camera phones and sounds like there's some mixed opinions out there. "This just like putting gas in your (beep) "skateboard, (beep) "don't need it. " (laughs) Phillipbloom says, "Let me think about that for a moment. " Clever, clever. Discoverwithdima says, "I love Moment lenses, "they're really great.

" I mean yeah Moment lenses are definitely high-quality stuff. "Why spend that kind of money "when you can get a real camera for that price?" That's exactly what I was thinking when I first got these. "I love using the Moment app "even though I can't afford the lenses. " That's one of the cool things about the Moment app is even if you don't have the lenses you can still install it and it still gives you some pretty powerful features. "While not the best tool in the shed "they offer great versatility "to an already versatile camera system, "just one more tool to help in the process.

" Thumbs up. Couldn't have said it better myself, thank you John. That's why I just read stuff now, I don't even have to come up with my own opinions I just read what you guys respond and I make a video ta-da. (laughs) But yeah, overall not for everybody but it's definitely one of the higher quality lenses you can get for the phone if not the best. I definitely don't suggest getting some cheap stuff on the internet, oop, and luckily it's the crappy one.

Anyways, let's finish this off by reading a few comments from my last video which was about the DJI Ronin-SC. Perfect little gimbal for little mirrorless cameras like this from DJI. Let's see what you guys had to say about that. "Potato Jet always has the best product reviews. "Come on DJI, hook Eugene up with some of that goodies.

" Guess who emailed me the other day? DJI, I'm in, I'm in with yes! Gerald Undone says, "This was awesome! "Really fun and funny. "Loved it. " Thank you Gerald and fun fact about Gerald, he's really tall. Are you surprised, are you shocked like me? See, I may look tiny next to Josh but Josh looks tiny next to Gerald, true story. "Hey Potato, what are your thoughts "about the red SSD mag controversy?" You know a felt a little bit burnt after that.

I mean, for those of you who don't know Red has these proprietary SSD mini mags and they're expensive. Basically, someone opened up these mini mags and found out that these SSDs inside of here are actually really cheap little SSDs like some that you can buy for 20 bucks that they're selling for almost a thousand bucks. Here it says made in the USA when it was using I think Kingston SSDS or some like that where it was made overseas. I don't know, I'll be pretty curious to see how red responds to this but I personally never had any issues with my mini mags. They're still running pretty solid.

So fingers crossed that when they were making mine they were at least using like $35 SSDs instead of 20, so. (mellow contemporary music).

Source : Potato Jet