Review – 12x Telephoto Lens for the Nokia Lumia 920

If there is just one thing Lumia 920 owners are happy about, it’s their camera. So it’s finally nice to see some aftermarket-accessories develop off of what Nokia has began (although personally, we would like to check out Nokia get included in this area too).

We have covered some magnetic lens plugs in the previous, and while "cheap" they did offer users a new creative capacity with their phones. After all, if you are a good professional photographer, you can make "art" out of anything at all and those lenses enabled some awesome options.

Now we've a 12x telephoto lens that comes out of Guangdong, China and it goes for just slightly less than $20 (plus shipping). We purchased ours through Amazon.com and it took about 10 days or so for the products to appear.

So how is it? It’s surprisingly well built. It’s a strong, elegant machine made aluminum body with a durable tripod. Fact be told, we’re a bit stunned about how nicely it all works together—nothing feels "cheap" about it, which includes the box that it came in (it’s one of those nice ones with a magnetic flap).

Of course the big matter is, quality of the photos. The lens is a fixed 12x telephoto, which means you have to "frame the photo with your feet", so to speak. The lens can be manually targeted and it too excels beyond our expectations. Anyone who knows a quality lens knows it must have a smooth, slow and steady rotator and this lens actually has that, making it feel like you’re focusing an old-school prime lens for a DSLR.

Photos themselves are "ok". Let us be obvious: this is not Nikon, Canon or Carl Zeiss creating the glass and there is a purpose why some of us pay $1K+ for our lenses in the first place. Purple fringing, discolored sides and a filter focal area are all side effects of a $20 lens.

Having said that, it’s still pretty cool.

Hello, for $20, we can think of worse things to spend our money on. Will we use it often? Who knows. But the 920’s camera is a work of art and it’s fun to play all around with such add-ons, even if they are niche or unique.