Your iPhone camera is pretty damn good, but it's not as good as dedicated camera with a big lens. A smartphone rig earns you convenience and portability, but you give up quality and utility. That's where the DxO One comes in. It's a palm-sized camera assembly for iPhone and iPad that plugs into your Lightning port and gives your mobile photos a serious performance boost. The 1-inch, 20-megapixel sensor sits behind a nice lens with an f/1.8 aperture. The software offers a suite of shooting modes and gives you full manual control over the camera's operation. Plug the $499 DxO One into your iPhone and fire up the companion iOS app, and all of a sudden, the photo frame on your phone's screen suddenly looks closer to what you'd see in the viewfinder of a Nikon D.
The photos it takes are stunning, and the tiny device is discreet enough to carry on any outing. The build feels sturdy and the device is comfortable to hold when attached to the phone. The app is incredibly easy to use, and within moments of downloading, plugging the camera in, and firing it up, you're shooting photos that simply could not have been taken with an iPhone.
It's a $500 iPhone accessory, which is really steep considering you could get a capable pocket camera for around $600. But of course, that camera isn't going to let you use your smartphone for everything, and it's not going fit in your pocket as easily. We ran into some performance issues with the DxO One. It's slower than our testing committee liked, it crashed several times, and it was prone to overheating. At one point, it overheated, shut down, and we weren't able to wake it back up. Clipping it in easy, though I found it a little awkward to get it to switch on so it could be plugged in. You have to slide the panel covering the lens on the side down, hold it, and then the Lightning plug will swing out—don't try to force the plug to pop up!
6/10 - The DxO One was super fun to use, and the photos we took with it are beautiful. But it's a little expensive and a little crashy.
