Hasta La Gadget!

Bhautik Joshi is the curious type, and likes to learn by doing. So when he started to wonder if he could hook up an SLR lens to an iPhone, the obvious thing to do was to try it. The resulting behemoth is the Phone-O-Scope, a monstrous mingling of an iPhone, a Canon lens and a sprinkling of plumbing supplies.

Joshi started off with the “optical coupler”, the device to get the light from one place to another. In this case the coupler was a trio of lenses from an old CD player, stuck together with putty and wrapped in paper to make cylinder. This unit works as a nice macro lens, but for the Phone-O-Matic it is there to bend the light from the back of the SLR lens into a shape more acceptable to the tiny iPhone camera.

After some measuring (using cardboard tubes and rubber bands), Joshi made a proper tube from PVC pipe couplings (threaded, to allow for focus adjustment), a rear lens-cap and a cheap iPhone case. The lens unit was secured to the case in the old fashioned way: a handful of duct-tape.

The Phone-O-Matic isn’t going to turn your iPhone into a DSLR, but the results are great — more Holga than Canon 5D MkII, although as Joshi points out, this is most likely the result of using CD player lenses. It’s also rather impractical — if you have space for this getup in your bag, you have space for a real camera. Still, that’s not the point. The point was to see if it could be done, and it can.