The DxO ONE Is A Plug-In iPhone Camera With A 1-Inch Sensor

Your iPhone camera is already one of the better mobile cameras available, but a new accessory from imaging technology leader DxO could up the iPhone’s game considerably. The Lightning-enabled DxO ONE has a super bright f1.8 aperture lens, and a 20.2 megapixel, 1-inch sensor. That sensor size is on par with the Sony RX100 series of compact camera, which produces amazing pictures in terms of image quality and noise in a small-body device, and should enable great effects like truly dramatic background blur.

The DxO ONE is even smaller than the RX100, however – it’s roughly as tall as your iPhone 6 is wide, and only about an inch thick. The camera can swivel around the Lightning port, turning your iPhone into basically a swivel LCD display, and it can capture RAW files, meaning you’ll have lots more flexibility with the finished product in terms of editing with programs like Adobe Lightroom.

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The DxO ONE has manually adjustable aperture, shutter speed and ISO settings, complete with the kinds of picture modes you’d see on a DSLR or micro four-thirds camera, and it can also capture video at 1080p/30fps, or at 720p/120fps for slow-motion effects. There’s a microSD card built-in for storage, and you can directly capture to your iPhone’s Camera Roll, too.

Here are some sample shots provided by DxO:

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This sounds like an amazing addition to any hobbyist photographer’s kit, and at $599, it retails for around what you’d expect to pay for a similarly equipped standalone camera (in a much smaller package). The RX100 IV is $1,000, for comparison, and while this has limitations like the fixed 32mm equivalent lens, it still sounds like an amazingly cool accessory.

The DxO ONE is available for pre-order on dxo.com, and is expected to begin shipping in the U.S. in September.