Protecting our expensive new smartphone is a top priority for many of us, and online marketplaces are flooded with options, from cases to display protection. An increasingly popular product segment is camera lens protectors, which obviously make a lot of sense if you’ve just spent over $1,000 on one of the best camera phones on the market.
While sticking a cheap layer of plastic or even glass in front of your high-precision camera might help protect it from scratches, there’s a risk that it will lower the quality of the pictures you take. Not necessarily because a protector will defocus or blur your images — something this close to the lens is unlikely to do that — but even a very transparent, high-quality protective layer will slightly reduce the amount of light reaching the sensor. In the worst case, introducing impure optics may exacerbate issues like edge aberration and lens flare, or reduce the amount of detail captured. Not what you want from a top-tier camera phone.
