I can see clearly now
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in smartphone, Web browser, Mobile, Apple on
The other day I finally bit the bullet, and traded in my old Blackberry Pearl for a shiny iPhone. I’d been using one to write some tutorials for IT Pro, and had finally got used to its touch keyboard - and had become used to the large screen and the high quality web browsing experience. I’d also started playing with the AppStore, and had found applications like Evernote, which promised to bring web, phone and desktop together. My memory is pretty bad most of the time, and a tool that could help me remember the things I’d seen seemed to be a rather good idea.
There was just one problem - the iPhone’s camera. I’m not complaining about its 2Mpx resolution, or even the lack of a video feed. They’re all par for the course with a cameraphone (unless you plump for those phones that are more camera than phone), and the iPhone’s is actually a pretty decent camera - most of the time. Where it falls down is its focal length. It’s great for portraits, for landscapes, as it’s a fixed focus camera that can keep most things in focus - as long as they’re more than about three feet away.
Using Evernote I found I was wanting to take photographs of pieces of text: the backs of business cards, notes scrawled on napkins, whiteboards. Evernote has a good online OCR service, putting OCR in the cloud and not on the phone, but it couldn’t cope with the iPhone’s blurry out of focus images.
Last week I got an email from the PR for Griffin, best known as one of the original iPod accessory companies. They’d just announced a new “business” case for the iPhone 3G, one that included what could be the solution to my iPhone text photography problem.
What was it?
A macro lens.
A couple of years ago Mary and I looked at a barcode recognition service that Microsoft Research was trying out. Like me, they’d found that phone cameras couldn’t cope with close-ups. They’d chosen to have stick on macro lenses manufactured, and for some time my tubby HTC Titan had a strange extra lens on the back.
Griffin’s Clarifi case is less obtrusive, with a little extra lens that slides over the camera slot in the case. It’s a workable solution, and it’s easy to quickly put the lens in place when you want to take a close-up photograph.
The million dollar question is, of course, “does it work?”. The answer is a qualified yes. It’s not perfect (but then plastic lenses rarely are), but it is a considerable improvement over Apple’s standalone fixed-focus implementation.
Here’s the before:
And here’s the after:
It’s not perfect, but it works pretty well!
One more step along the road to finding my ideal portable device.
Rated: 80% (1 votes)
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