’ve seen plenty of products that snap a lens over top of your existing smartphone lens, but nothing quite like this. The Hasselblad True Zoom is a Moto Mod that works with Moto Z phones, completely replaces your phone camera with a point–shoot that gives you 10X optical zoom. It certainly doesn’t come anywhere near approximating the quality of Hasselblad’s famous medium-format cameras. ly, Hasselblad should be ashamed to have their name on this.
It’s a curiosity, a technical “huh, that’s kinda neat” exercise that delivers lower quality less value than a comparably priced point–shoot camera.
Hasselblad in name only
Hasselblad is famous for its high-quality medium-format cameras. en NASA took cameras into space on Mercury, Gemini, Apollo missions, they were (somewhat modified) Hasselblads. This Moto Mod will not deliver quality deserving of the name.
Snap it onto your Moto Z, it completely replaces the built-in camera (currently only the Moto Z ay is supported, with a software update coming soon for the Moto Z Z Force). The camera app works the same, but the HDR toggle is gone, in its place you get a few shooting modes. You can shoot G, black–white G, or G + RA
You lose HDR shooting, but gain a few shooting modes. It’s not a good tradeoff.
A thin grip makes it a little easier to hold your phone horizontally for shots, a tiny, flimsy zoom switch quickly pulls the lens from 4.5mm to 45mm (equivalent to 25mm to 250mm on a 35mm camera). There’s a reasonably bright xenon flash, toggled using the on-screen button. And of course, the shutter button. That’s it. That’s all the physical controls you get.
You want physical controls? You get a shutter button, power button, flimsy zoom switch. That’s it.
The True Zoom features it’s own sensor, a 12-megapixel, 1/2.3-inch CMOS that doesn’t particularly impress me. Sure it’s got 1.55 micron pixels, but these specs don’t supercede the best smartphones. The size resolution is matched by the Nexus 6 ile most good phones have a lens with an aperture in the f/1.8 to f/2.0 range, the True Zoom features a fixed aperture that is f/3.5 when zoomed out, f/6.5 when zoomed in. That narrower aperture means worse low-light shots.
The grip is better than nothing, but too shallow to be really useful.
So you’ve got a sensor equivalent to what you’d find in a good smartphone, a much smaller aperture, a couple of extra physical controls. l photos are sent to the camera over the Moto Mod interface, to be processed by the phone. The interface really isn’t fast enough for burst photography, there’s a significant lag after taking each shot.
The shutter is small zoom switch flimsy, those are really the only controls you get.
You can’t even record great video. You’re limited to 1080p at 30fps. No slow motion, no 4K. Optical image stabilization is limited to still shots, so with video you get electronic stabilization.
10X optical zoom not much else
The whole point of this Mod is to give you a true optical zoom. That’s something smartphones can’t do. Those thin bodies prohibit moving lenses, so you’re stuck with crummy digital zoom.
Yep, that’s 10X optical zoom all right. It’s really the only thing the Hasselblad True Zoom does quite well. (www.almostthererescue.org)
As far as that goes, the True Zoom works. You can get clear shots from a long way away, quickly zoom in out. And that’s about it. It doesn’t take better photos than any of the Moto Z phones it works with, let alone industry-leading phones from the likes of Samsung or Apple.
Indoors, photos with the True Zoom (right) are dimmer, duller, noisier than those shot with the Moto Z ay.
otos in low light are a bit dull visibly grainy. In bright light it fares better, but it’s still somehow slightly soft still shows noise. In other words, you’re better off not snapping this onto your phone, even if you have it with you, unless you need to zoom in. That’s a fairly scathing indictment: The snap-on replacement camera is worse than the built-in one.
uld you pay $250 more to get the photo on the right? Me either.
y too many flaws
A Moto Mod that you slap onto the back of your phone instantly replace the built-in camera with something way better? at a great idea!
It’s too bad the Hasselblad True Zoom isn’t actually better. For $250 you get true 10X optical zoom, along with lower-quality photos, worse video, no HDR, to few physical controls. The True Zoom doesn’t even have it’s own built-in battery, so it drains your Moto Z’s battery quite a bit.
For the same price you can get a dedicated point–shoot like the Canon werShot SX610 ($245 on Amazon) that will give you more zoom, more detail, better image quality, more physical controls. There’s little excuse for this Moto Mod to cost what it does, considering that the phone does most of the heavy lifting. I’m not sure I would pay $50 for this Moto Mod, let alone 5 times that price. It’s a great idea, but the execution value proposition are miles from where they should be.
