Tom's Guide Verdict
The build and image quality of Moment's iPhone lenses are great, but at $90 for each lens, this system is not cheap.
Pros
- +
Excellent build quality, easy to change lenses
- +
Great image quality
Cons
- -
Individual lenses are expensive
- -
Telephoto lens is somewhat superfluous on the iPhone 7 Plus
Why you can trust Tom's Guide Our writers and editors spend hours analyzing and reviewing products, services, and apps to help find what's best for you. Find out more about how we test, analyze, and rate.
The Moment Photo Case is one of our favorite case/lens combos for the iPhone 7, and that trend continues with a new model for the larger iPhone 7 Plus. This new case comes with a slew of new lenses: an $80.99 macro, $89.99 wide angle, $89.99 telephoto and $80.99 superfish (a fish-eye wide angle). These lenses aren't cheap; for the same price as just one of these lenses, you can get a set of three lenses in the Olloclip Core set.
Editor's Note: Moment confirmed that this case will work with the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus, too.
Design
The Moment Photo Case is a smart, nicely designed case that fits comfortably around the iPhone 7 Plus body. It's available both in plain black and with a wood veneer. The lenses screw into this case; a simple 90-degree turn locks even the heavier lenses in place. On the iPhone 7 Plus, the lens can be fitted over either of the two cameras, but the lens covers the camera not in use, so you don't get to use features like Portrait Mode or the smart zoom.
The improvements in the new lenses are generally good, with significantly sharper images and fewer issues like chromatic aberration. They feel less necessary for the iPhone 7 Plus than they might with other iPhones, though. The 7 Plus' dual-camera setup renders the Moment telephoto lens somewhat superfluous. The quality of the wide-angle and macro lenses impressed us, though; both produce clean, sharp images.
Macro Lens
The 25mm macro lens ($80.99) includes a white, plastic hood that fits on top of the lens, allowing you to hold the phone over your subject, while still letting light through. This works quite well, as long as you have plenty of ambient light.
This lens and the autofocus lens of the iPhone 7 Plus also give you a fairly decent depth of focus. You can capture objects up to about a third of an inch tall. Anything larger than that, though, and the parts closest to the camera turn into a blurry mess.
The Superfish lens ($89.99) shoots attractive, very wide-angle photos with about 170 degrees of view. You don't get the round, framed image that some fish-eye lenses shoot; instead, you get a normal, rectangular image that covers the whole 170 degrees in landscape mode, or about 100 degrees in portrait. The images the lens captures are of good quality, but get a little soft at the edges of the frame, where fine details get lost in a fuzzy haze.
Telephoto
The $99.99 telephoto effectively doubles the focal length of the iPhone camera, letting you get closer to the subject. The image quality is good, but it's kind of redundant with the iPhone 7 Plus, which includes two cameras that already do much the same thing. Because the Moment lens obscures the other camera, you can't use this (or any of these lenses) in collaboration with the smart-zoom feature of the 7 Plus.
The 18mm wide angle also produces high-quality images, widening the view of the iPhone 7 Plus camera to about 100 degrees in landscape mode and 70 degrees in portrait. That's great for group shots or for getting up close and personal with a subject, but be careful: There is some distortion at the edge of the frame that makes faces look elongated or distorted.
Bottom Line
It's not cheap, but the Moment Photo Case and lens system is the best choice for serious shooters. It makes photos from the iPhone 7 Plus look even better.
