I’ve seen the word “Lensbong” being bounced around so much, mostly used in Indonesia and India. But I never really asked what’s the meaning until one day, when someone asked me. So I googled around and this is what I found.
The word “lensbong” in the context of mobile-macro simply refers to a hand-made lens where the lens is recycled from an old camera or camcorder.
As far as I’m concerned, it’s just a label and does not tell me the quality of the photos that it can produce, which is always my main concern. But I must admit that so far, all the lensbong (25mm, 30mm, 40mm and 49mm) that I’ve tested have produced pretty good photos. This is in contrast to the other non-lensbong that I’ve bought from China – I’d say 50% of those are quite useless.
Also the numbers 25mm, 30mm etc doesn’t really tell you the focusing distance – probably because they’re all hand-made. So I find that for the 30mm and 49mm, I have to go real close, which I like. They cannot be used for bigger insects. But the 40mm can only be used to shoot bigger insects like butterflies and it cannot focus well when doing close-ups.
As for the “extreme” lens, it’s supposed to shoot very small subjects. But I gave up on it because it’s very difficult to focus well, the depth of field is very very narrow (eg if you focus on the eyes, the feelers are out-of-focus and vice versa).