Your iPhone already comes with a great camera that belies its 8 MP tag. Its reputation as the most popular camera on Flickr also proves that ‘the best camera is the one you have with you at the moment.’
But what if you’re looking for something more substantial, something that approaches DSLRs in terms of quality, a camera that offers a bit more control and is more capable than the ultra-minimalistic Apple shooter? Allow us to present the DxO ONE.
Small enough to fit into your pocket, the ONE connects to an iPhone via its Lightning jack and promises to enhance its imaging capabilities by a big margin. It weighs in at only 3.8 oz (108g) and stands just 2.65″ tall, but packs in a 1″-type BSI-CMOS sensor, the same one found in the superlative Sony Cyber-shot RX100 III. With its super bright f1.8 aperture lens and a 20.2 megapixels, this gives the ONE great low light sensitivity and Raw dynamic range because it is, well, a Sony sensor.
The ONE can also swivel around the Lightning port, basically turning the phone into an LCD display. It also has the ability to record RAW images, great for post-processing. It is also well featured, with manually adjustable aperture, shutter speed and ISO settings, and can capture video at 1080p/30fps, or at 720p/120fps for slow-motion effects. There’s a microSD card built-in for storage, and it captures images directly to your iPhone’s Camera Roll, too.
DxOMark, an image quality measuring company, did its standard test on the DxO ONE sensor, and the camera achieved a score of 70, which is “on par with full frame DSLRs and dramatically higher than any smartphone.” It scored up to 85 when a ‘SuperRAW’ feature is activated —capturing 4 RAW frames in rapid succession and then merging them together for a better-quality image.
There’s just one small problem though; the ONE isn’t cheap, coming in at $599. You do get free copies of DxO’s proprietary professional grade photo editing and film emulation software along with it, but for that price we reckon you really should be looking at a low-end DSLR if you’re serious about photography.
