Cygnett GoCapture Wide Angle Lens

HARD TO POSITION, BUT GOOD RESULTS.

THE GOCAPTURE CERTAINLY looks the goods as far as clip-on lenses go, with an attractive metallic red body, contrasting black trim around the edge, and a decent heft to it that suggests a quality product. But our experience with it wasn’t quite so positive. From the outset, we couldn’t get it perfectly positioned over the camera of any of the current smartphones we were using for testing. Try as we might, we couldn’t clip the lens on without severe vignetting in one or more corners. The fact that we were able to get it positioned vignette-free with an older Samsung Galaxy S7 suggests that the GoCapture’s lens opening is too small to completely cover the larger sensors on newer devices. If this isn’t an issue, then the GoCapture does a reasonably good job of widening the smartphone camera’s field of view to 140°. As with any clip-on lens, you sacrifice on image quality — mainly with reduced sharpness and detail — but this can be a worthy tradeoff to get images that wouldn’t otherwise be possible, particularly with interiors, landscapes and groups shots.