Up Close and Personal

With The Reeflex 240 mm Super Telephoto

It’s a great time to be an iPhone photographer. I’ve said this many times before and I’m sure I’ll say it again because in the mobile photography space, new and exciting things just keep happening. The latest new thing is an attachment lens from the folks at Reeflex. It’s the 240 mm Super Telephoto lens and it will be on every mobile photographer’s wish list. 

The first question you might be asking is how they come up with the focal length of 240 mm. With phone cameras, the actual focal length is generally a number less than 10 mm, and the numbers advertised are focal length equivalents in relation to a 35 mm camera. The new lens from Reeflex has been designed to fit over the Telephoto Camera on the iPhone 15 Pro Max and both iPhone 16 Pro models. These cameras have a focal length equivalency of 120 mm, so obviously the Super Telephoto is a 2x lens. 

Reeflex began a Kickstarter campaign a few months ago to obtain funding for this lens, and they met their goal in just 8 minutes. I was happy to be an early backer in this campaign. As time went on, they kept getting more funding, stretching the goal from 10,000 Euros to over 388,000. That tells me this is a product that a lot of people want to use, and I don’t blame them.

Now, let’s talk about the lens. The build quality is every bit as good as the G-Series lenses that came out in early 2024, and they are solid. The Reeflex team designed their new lens completely in-house, from the ground up, and I tip my hat to them for doing such an amazing job. One would think a lens this size would weigh enough to make holding an iPhone to take photos uncomfortable, but it really doesn’t. My large iPhones – I use the 15 and 16 Pro Maxes – might be heavier than a lot of folks prefer but I don’t mind them at all, and having a lens attached certainly adds weight. The 240 is actually lighter than the G-Series 2x Telephoto lens. 

The glass inside the lens provides a very clear view so image quality is excellent, and the edge to edge sharpness is the best I’ve seen in a mobile lens. All of Reeflex’s lenses come with a small cap for the opening at the back, a magnetic lens cap, and a nifty cloth sack to carry them in. Oh, and in the cloth sack is a lens cleaning cloth, too, which is handy for cleaning the iPhone’s cameras. I mean, you do get fingerprints on yours too, right? 

Any reputable lens maker will have a case available for a number of phones that include a proper mounting system over the cameras. Reeflex uses the 17 mm thread system, which I like because once the lens is mounted, you know it won’t fall off. I got the leather MagSafe case for my lens when I filled out the Kickstarter survey and it’s not only a very nice looking case, but the phone attaches very securely to a MagSafe compatible phone holder or tripod head. 

To illustrate just how much reach you can get from the 240 mm lens, I took a photo of a farm implement in a snowy field, both with the 1x Fusion camera and with the lens mounted over the 5x Telephoto camera of my 16 Pro Max. These images are unedited so the wide view from the 1x will show the subject darker due to the sun in the frame.  We all know how iPhones, and phones in general, take wide angle shots when using the 1x camera. Shooting with the 240 mm on a camera that already has a respectable amount of reach is – yes, I’m going to say it – a real game changer! 

There are other phones on the market that can zoom in on a subject at 100x or maybe even 200x, but these are mostly digital zooms. The reach that is attainable with the 240 mm is the first ever for an iPhone, and it’s completely optical. Advanced iPhoneographers can maximize the benefits of this setup by shooting in Bayer RAW, which I’ve done. Sometimes the luxuries of ProRAW, which include sharpening, SmartHDR, and noise reduction can have a little too much processing, even for a DNG file.  My point is that a mobile photographer’s kit can now be expanded to include a lens that might be good enough to capture high quality images from a distance that’s within reason. 

Speaking of reasonable distance, and to expand on the point of getting up close and personal, the 240 mm can be bundled with a pair of macro attachments that allow you to shoot very sharp macro photos from up to 300 mm away from the subject. Ah, macro. Now that’s something I can get excited about. You’d think that since I wrote a book about macro photography with the iPhone, I would have bought the macro attachments with my Kickstarter pledge, but since I have the two Reeflex macro lenses already, I didn’t think I’d need them. Well, I was wrong. 

There are a couple of things about the macro attachments that make them so desirable. The first and most obvious thing is that you don’t have to get in real close to your subject. The macro attachments are made to achieve focus at distances of 200 mm and 300 mm. It’s similar to the regular macro lenses where one focuses at 25 mm and the other at 75 mm. This makes it so much easier to capture great close ups of insects or other subject matter that may be too far away for a goo macro shot. 

Secondly, physics is on your side when doing macro with the 240. With the regular G-Series macros, the depth of field is extremely small, which is look because you get a wonderful bokeh with every shot, but when shooting with the 240 mm, the depth of field is considerably larger as far as macro shots go. This is such good news because there are times when the depth of field of a regular macro lens is just too small. This is a very welcomed achievement by the Reeflex team. Since I don’t have the macro attachments – they’re due to ship a couple of weeks after I publish this post – I’ve relied on my podcast co-host, Dwight Broeman to supply me with a couple of photos to illustrate the quality of the 240 mm lens with the macro attachments. 

I have been having a lot of fun taking photos with this lens. I’ve favoured the Telephoto camera on the iPhone ever since my first “pro” iPhone, which was the 12 Pro Max. And I think it’s worth noting that the 240 mm can indeed be used on the Telephoto camera of an older Pro iPhone, going back to the iPhone 13 Pro. Since it’s a 2x conversion, it will double those cameras from 77 mm to 144 mm, which is still a respectable gain. 

As you’ll see in the gallery below, the 240 mm Super Telephoto lens is just as good as a regular lens you’d find on a camera, but it’s much more affordable. I know, I know, it’s a phone lens. And I get that it’s not as sharp as a lens five times its size with a working aperture. But when you compare the price of $311 CAD to a Canon or Sony 24-240 mm lens at $1200 and $1575 respectively that can be used on a full-frame camera, the Reeflex lens is a steal. And it’s a great lens for getting 10x optical reach with your phone.