Last year a design for a telephoto lens smartphone add-on appeared in very basic renders.

Canon News has now uncovered a patent showing this addon in great detail.

With what we've seen Canon do with the likes of the PowerShot Zoom and PowerShot Pick, they have shown they're not afraid to try new products and form factors to see how the market responds.

With the traditional PowerShot lineup all but dead, it looks like these are the type of products Canon is going to be trying, as well as trying to figure out a way to appeal to the Smartphone photographers.

The key to anything like this is good usability, an affordable price, and most importantly, better optical performance over a phone camera like Samsung's Galaxy S21 Ultra, which sports a 108mp image sensor and 100x zoom.

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11 comments

  1. Fine.
    A smartphone with this adapter will be larger than an EOS RP.:ROFLMAO:
    The smartphone would be in my pocket anyway and the adapter is smaller than most lenses that I carry around with me.
  2. This feels like a losing battle.

    I already prefer to use my Samsung Galaxy S21+ Ultra over my Powershot Zoom.
    There won't even be a battle, due to lack of combatants.
  3. While I give Canon credit for trying to find innovative products to attract new users, their attempts always look to me like ideas cooked up by guys my age trying to imagine what might appeal to "young whippersnappers."
  4. For what it’s worth, the Powershot Zoom was a grave disappointment. I bought and returned after finding its usable performance far below that of conventional unstabilized optics in the same price and size range. Really bad.
  5. I have a cheap plastic $13 8-12x zoom that I used to use before the iPhone 5/4 & first 5se died that was more useful than any product I’ve seen like this. They’re trying too hard. All you need is a good case and threaded filter to attach it instead of the plastic clothes hanger type that most companies have and it’s golden.
    Moment has the closest thing to this but not enough zoom. The companies that do the plastic ones of course aren’t too heavy but glass would of course. If they could make one that is 3-8/4-10, or 5-12x there about and put just a little effort towards it being compact it would be a successful product.
    I haven’t found a cheap one yet for a multi lensed iPhone yet, but if amazon.com can have double digit priced lenses that people are amazed that just my photos are from an iPhone then I’d be willing to bet canon can make one and not have reviews leading to buyers passing right by like hopefully most do for their previous products like the PS Zoom.

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