So in March I received the Moment 18 lens for the iPhone 6s Plus as a birthday gift. After a good 2,5 months of use I wanted to share with you my experience and my use cases for the Moment 18 lens.

But firsts, many people are wondering, what is the Moment 18 lens actually? What are your talking about?

It’s an add on for the iPhone camera lens. You screw it on top of a provided mounting plate.

This mounting plate you attach to your phone or tablet with a glue band. So this one stays on your phone and has a whole for the camera lens. The benefit is that you can order a few different sizes of the mounting plates if you like (for an iPad for example) and switch the camera lens between devices.

What I’ve experienced with this mounting plate is that’s fairly large and it seems that my iPhone bumper has some issues with it. After a month of use I started to see cracks coming in the bumper case. Just along the lines of the mounting plate.

The Moment Lens mounting plate really keeps the lens on its place and it doesn’t move at all. Which is good because you don’t want to have any issues with a moving lens just the moment you take a picture.

Then the lens itself

It’s a wonderful, small little piece of lens with some great glass. You screw it on top of the mounting plate and it stays there until you unscrew it.

The size is great, it’s obvious of course that you have a lens attached to your phone, but it’s very portable.

Unfortunately, you can’t let it on your phone the whole time, because it sticks out.

The lens itself creates a wide panoramic feeling and sensation in your photo or video.

It’s great for interior, landscape and close up photography. Although they have a special macro lens I’m very impressed with the macro performance.

There’s very little of distortion in your photographs, especially in interior and short distance photographs. The only thing where I’ve remarked a bit of distortion is on distance photographs and panoramic photographs.

What I did remark is the vignette effect present on all photographs. This is something you need to cut out of the photo if you don’t like it.

The Lens quality

The quality of the lens is top notch, both in feeling and the actual glad I it. You can feel that it’s made of quality.

And it really improves your photos as long as it’s not of a large distance and you don’t mind cleaning up the photo in the editing process.

Video with the Moment Lens 18 Wide

Where the lens really shines is not actually the photos but in the video department.

As many if you know is that when you switch the phone to video mode, the viewfinder will become smaller and you actually record a closer up version of a photograph.

This lens reverses this and makes sure that you have a far wider video view.

So you don’t have to back up anymore if you want to take a similar view with the video.

And because the video mode is already cutting various corners, the vignette effect is not present and the slight distortion you would get for a distance photographs is non-existing here.

This together with the 4K video mode on the phone I’m getting very sharp and wide video nowadays when I screw the lens onto the lens.

Next to the lens and the mounting plate, there is a small cotton bag in the package to store the lens while traveling.

If you order a lens, I would advise you to take as well a lens pen to clean up the lens and the camera glass behind the mounting plate. Because of all the dust this collects, it’s good to clean it regularly.

Why would you need it?

If you want to take phone photography to a different level and want to play with the different options a separate lens might give you, I can recommend this one, especially if you create a lot of videos.

The price is 99 dollar excluding tax and shipping costs from China. There will be both VAT tax charged and import taxes. This is not really obvious if you order but shows up under other costs.

Would I buy it again?

Yes and no. I was really expecting a lot from this lens, especially for photography. But at the end of the day I use it less then expected. I do use it a lot more often for videos though, so yes I would buy it again. But with less expectations.