QUESTION · SATURDAY Q&A

Does this accessory really turn your phone to a pro camera?

ASKED BY · Paul Walhus · AUSTIN, TEXAS · 17 OCT 2026 · ▶ 00:56:42

THE PANEL'S ANSWER
Guy

External lens attachments for smartphones are gimmicky; instead rely on improvements in built-in smartphone cameras like the iPhone 18 Pro's physical aperture control; if you need a serious camera, buy a dedicated camera rather than attaching accessories to a phone intended for portability.

Summarised by AI from what the panel said. Watch the moment for the full answer.

IN THEIR OWN WORDS

From the transcript.

Machine-transcribed, so it may contain errors. Every timestamp opens the episode at that second.

56:41It doesn't look particularly great. I will say, here it is, here's the video. It looks like it's made by, is this Huawei? Huawei Mate 90 Pro Max Collector's Edition. Well it's a collector product so it must be great. I don't, I'm not really a fan of sticking stuff like this on a phone. I just feel like, you know, if you need a big lens, buy a real camera.

57:09For me, the iPhone, a smartphone, is supposed to be something that is light, that I can just take anywhere. And obviously, on a year-to-year basis, companies like Apple, I mean, all companies that make smartphones, they're making big strides in the sensor design. Obviously, the new iPhone 18 Pro is the best camera they've ever done now. They've got the physical aperture blades now.

57:30so you can control that if you want more shallow depth of field or greater depth of field, that kind of stuff. So this kind of stuff seems incredibly gimmicky to me. So I'm not a super fan of that stuff. All right, that's going to wrap the Saturday show. I want to thank all the panelists for being here this morning and answering these questions.

57:49And, of course, to you, yes, I'm looking at you right now, the producers that show up every morning. We wouldn't have a show without you if you didn't put these questions in. Thank you very much, and thanks to all of you in the live chat who have been commenting and just, you know, I consider you sort of the panel adjacent because you put in all this feedback and you often provide solutions when sometimes we come up short,

58:10you always come through for us. We really appreciate you. And of course, the back end crew that wakes up every single day to put these morning shows on and also all the evening shows that happen as well. We really appreciate the work that you do. If we were to have traveled around the world virtually to answer all of these questions, it would have been, according to the

58:27The tele-electroversal would be 19,000 miles. That's 31,000 kilometers and 153 million bananas for scale. This was episode 2398. If you've got a little time, why not jump into after hours? We'll see you. Bye. All right. Yeah, I'm surprised, Alexander, that you didn't know about the music trades. I've never heard of these. We used to have these laying around in the lunchroom, you know, just so people could

59:01go through the data because it was always so, a lot of times it's just the opposite of what you'd ever think that it was. There's just so much data. I mean, some of it's expensive, but the basic man, what do you call it? Magazine wasn't that expensive, but yeah, there'd be like the top 200. What? I missed that, Mickey. mickey uh your audio your audio just was that is that just me or guy guy's audio just dropped there

59:30uh i'm sorry i was listening to comms uh yeah so there's like the global 225 report this two-part report the 225 uh music companies around the world ranked by the most recent full-year revenues plus employee count ceo base country web address for each basic sales and demographics so yeah it's It's just intelligence. And they're still around as a digital – like they don't do the print thing anymore?

59:54Yeah, they still do the print thing. Oh, they do? The nice thing is that you get the print thing, and then if you find something that you want, one of these data reports, they're like – some of them are $10, some of them are $100. Actually, this one here, all data. Yeah, so here's the international package is $139. The supplier package is $200.

1:00:14I was just going to ask if it's U.S. only or not, but they do have – Oh, no. No, this is world. Well, there's international stuff like this one. Yeah, I fell into this category. I was in the internet music retail.

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from Office Hours | Saturday | October 17, 2026.

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