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Virgin America's TV controller looks pretty gross with this iPhone zoom lens

Virgin America's TV controller looks pretty gross with this iPhone zoom lens

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Testing Olloclip's new iPhone 6 macro lenses at 30,000 feet

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We just spent a whole week in Las Vegas looking at all sorts of gadgets and writing up our thoughts in hands-on posts. While we were there, Olloclip gave us the new 3-in-1 macro lens to try out. It has the same magnification capabilities as the one for the iPhone 5 and 5s — 7x, 14x, and a crazy 21x zoom — but the form factor has been updated to fit the iPhone 6.

At those magnification levels it gets a little tough to keep your phone steady, but you have to be so close to your subject anyways that you can lean on the plastic guards which come along with the clip. If you can steady yourself enough — not an easy feat when you're fighting turbulence — the lenses can let you get closer than ever while producing some really great images.

Things were so mental at CES that I didn't have much time to put the macro clip through its paces, so on my 5-hour flight back to New York I figured I'd test it out. There really isn't a wealth of gadgets to shoot when you're 30,000 feet in the air, so I tested it on this in-flight remote that looks like it hasn't been cleaned since the original iPhone was announced. I was able to dodge the flu that everyone warned me I would catch at my first CES, but I most certainly contracted something from this thing.

Seriously, someone should clean this thing

You can see in some of the photos that there's distortion in the corners, and you really can't shoot anything more than a few inches away. The focus is tough to nail down sometimes of that, but these are obviously not meant to compete with a real macro lens — you're still just shooting with a phone. Otherwise, the lenses are solid.

The new clip will be available later this year, but Olloclip has a 4-in-1 available now that includes 10x and 15x macros if you can't wait. All photos were shot with an iPhone 6 on a mix of the 7x, 14x, and 21x lenses, and edited in VSCO.

7x

14x

21x