One of the biggest advantages of using a mirrorless camera over a smartphone is access to a range of impressive telephoto zoom lenses – but a Hong Kong company is aiming to give smartphones a massive 20x to 60x zoom with an add-on lens. The Apexel 20-60x is an add-on zoom lens that gives smartphones up to a 60x zoom, but it needs manual focusing.
Smartphone add-on lenses aren’t uncommon, but the Apexel 20-60x is large enough that it looks more like the zoom lens used on a DSLR or mirrorless camera. The lens uses 13 elements in ten groups in order to give smartphones a 1440mm equivalent reach. That’s a pretty impressive range to give to a smartphone.
However, the large reach isn’t the only thing about the Apexel 20-60x that’s giving off real telephoto lens vibes. The lens includes both a zoom ring and a focus ring. Most smartphone add-on lenses still use the smartphone’s autofocus. But a 20-60x zoom isn’t a normal smartphone add-on lens. The more telephoto reach you give a lens, the more that optic will exaggerate background blur. That manual focus ring is likely a must to get the shot in focus.
The lens also incorporates a screw-on filter design at the front, which means photographers can add 58mm filters to the lens, such as circular polarizing filters or star filters.
Apexel says that the lens also doubles as a monocular. That makes sense, as I know a lot of birders who aren’t photographers will place their smartphone lens up to their binoculars to take a photo of a bird they saw (with rather poor results, however).
Apexel claims that the lens has less than four percent distortion, which is impressive for a typical smartphone add-on lens and not just one that offers a massive 60x zoom. Smartphone lenses are simply lenses over another lens, so they tend to suffer from some distortion. Another impressive claim is that the lens allows in 99.5% of light, so the lens isn’t cutting back too much of the light that’s coming in.
The Apexel 20-60x is launching on Kickstarter. But, it’s not just the crowdfunding platform that’s giving me pause, besides the manual focusing. The add-on lens is being sold as a bundle with a tripod – and I suspect a tripod is nearly required to get a decent image from a 60x add-on lens attached to the front of a smartphone. The company says it can be used handheld, but a 60x lens without stabilization will likely show dramatic improvement when used with a tripod rather than handheld. Using a tripod negates a bit of the smartphone’s best feature: portability.
We loved the recent Apexel PhoneMicro5 smartphone microscope kit, but were less impressed with the brand’s earlier 200x microscope lens – it’s hard to judge a lens based on specs alone. The image samples the company is sharing on the Kickstarter page look a bit crunchy or overprocessed, while others seem too soft.
The Apexel 20-60x is launching on Kickstarter, with an estimated ship date of May 2025. The expected list price is $300 (roughly £240 / AU$477), with those willing to take the early Kickstarter risk getting as much as 47% off. The campaign has already exceeded $40,000 USD (about £32,00 / AU$23,720), more than ten times the original goal.
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