Every serious photographer knows this saying: "The best camera is the one you have with you." And for many of us—even those, like me, who love their DSLR—the camera we always have with us is our smartphone. This is why photography aficionados have long dreamt of using real, high-quality lenses on our phones. The Olympus Air seeks to make that a reality.
It's a go-between gadget that lets you use genuine camera lenses with your smartphone. The cupcake-sized Air has a 16-megapixel micro-four-thirds sensor, far larger than any sensor inside an iPhone or Android handset. Yet it relies on the smartphone as its viewfinder and control panel.
The concept offers a significant upgrade over any smartphone camera because of the versatile range of lenses it can use. Zoom lenses let you get closer to a subject (like San Francisco seagulls I snapped during testing), or lenses with an outstandingly shallow depth of field, for captivating portraits. Simply put, your phone isn't capable of capturing the shots that the Air lets you take.
But while the $300 Air's images impressed me over the last couple weeks, the device isn't yet all I've dreamt it would be. The Air connects to your phone over Bluetooth to give you control over camera settings and, simultaneously, over Wi-Fi to let you preview, capture and transfer photos.
Carrying around the 5.1-ounce cylinder and a few tiny lenses is a lot easier than dragging around my DSLR kit. But the built-in plastic phone grip never felt like it was securely holding onto my phone. There's also no built-in image stabilization. At times, the app that controlled the camera was slow in responding to my on-screen taps, and my photos came out blurry.
Olympus's app also often froze when I was moving around, or after taking a shot. So much so that I couldn't rely on the Air to take photos as quickly as I'd like. A few times, I missed the shot I wanted to take because of the lag.
And since the Air relies on a direct Wi-Fi link to my phone to operate, it was also tricky to keep the Air connected to my iPhone.
The Air's non-replaceable battery only lasted me about half a day while shooting. That's not bad for a short hike, but this makes it a camera you can't count on for a vacation or even a weekend away. I also had to use two different Air cameras during my review as the first one unexpectedly stopped connecting to my phone after a few days of shooting.
The Air was a blast to use, when it worked, but it isn't replacing my phone or my DSLR as my cameras of choice just yet. The Olympus Air represents a dream we photographers all have, of shrinking the greatness of DSLRs down to pocket size. But the issues I experienced make the Air feel more like a proof of concept than the future realized.
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Source: Olympus Air Review: The Future of iPhone Cameras?
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