I never tested the cellphone adapter until yesterday, here are some examples with and without macro stand.
The bee/basil picture was shot without macro stand, so this is a telephoto configuration. As you see the image circle is smaller than the field of view of the phone, so you probably want to crop on the phone by digitally zooming. Though I don't have any experience with any other telephoto "adapter" for phones, 1:1 crop looks pretty good to me for a cellphone picture. The third picture was shot from roughly the same position as the previous one but without the monocular to show you how far I was from the bee. Oh, the cellphone is google pixel 3, these are in-camera jpeg (down-sampled or 1:1 crop using lightroom).
I was NOT using an eyepiece hood (comes with the kit) to block the ambient light, i.e. there was a big gap between the monocular eyepiece and the cellphone lens. Yes I'm lazy. I used my hand to block as much light as possible but the black area outside of the image circle in the first picture is not really black, I suspect that the contrast could have been better if I used the hood.
One serious drawback of this is, since the phone screen is REALLY off to the side of the optical axis of the monocular, and since this was a fairly long telephoto looking at a close range, it wasn't easy to figure out where I was pointing the lens at. This was less of a problem when shooting an object really far away.
Salt crystals as well as PF Marketplace on the ipad screen were shot with the macro stand. I used built-in LED lights for the former. It's sharp at the center but quite out-of-focus and also with significant yellow/blue fringes as you go closer to the edge. This might also be dependent on the phone and how well the phone's optical axis is co-aligned with the monocular's. FYI, that " Marketpla" is about 7/16" or 11mm wide on my ipad.
You can only focus at around a plane where the macro stand is standing on, you cannot really change that by moving focus rocker, and DOF is really thin. I tried to picture a tiny basil flower and it was impossible to keep everything reasonably well focused (not shown). And forget about macro of moving creatures.
The phone clamp allows the phone to slide sideways, and the thumbscrew could be loosened to move the phone up and down (6th picture). Adjusting the phone-monocular alignment this way is cumbersome, I need at least a minute or two of trial and error, you start over each time you attach the phone, and this is equally true for telephoto configuration. This is definitely NOT something for "hey what's that bird, take a picture now!" type moments. Since my cameras are more convenient for that kind of thing and are ergonomically much better (look at the last photo), I think my usage of the cellphone adapter will be limited, but I have to say it's kind of fun to look at tiny things on the phone screen that is MUCH better than my camera LCD once everything is set up properly.
Last edited by kwb; 10-16-2020 at 10:15 PM.
Reason: oops^2, fogot to strip gps info from pictures.