One thing you might not consider in every day life is the fact that cameras have a limited focus range. Generally on the far end they'll focus out to infinity (which is to say, parallel light rays will end up focused to a point, at least within the basic limitations of the optics), but on the near end they can often be quite limited when you really want to get in close to something.
Now if you have something like an iPhone you might just be stuck with whatever optical system it came with, or maybe you might try a stick-on adapter lens or something. But when we venture back to the olden days of standalone cameras, we start to get some real options.
Like, for example, close-up adapters.
If I were to try to take a picture of the label on this box with just the regular 14-42 zoom lens on this camera, I'd get something like this.
Yes, I took a close-up picture, but it's obviously violently out of focus, so not particularly useful. But if I add one of the close-up adapters, things start to look much more clear.
This is using the +10 diopter adapter, which, if no other lenses are involved, will focus at 1/10th of a meter. The lens on my camera claims it'll focus at 1/5th of a meter, so +5, and adding the two together gives us a new minimum focus of 1/15th of a meter. So that means going down from 20cm to 6.66cm.
Things are a bit less dramatic with the other adapters, which yield a combined minimum distance of 1/6, 1/7, and 1/9 meters (16.6cm, 14cm, 11.1cm respectively). But the bonus with them is that the maximum focal distance is much less compromised, because remember that the main lens only goes out to infinity, or 0 diopters, so the maximum focal distance is 1m, 50cm, 25cm and 10cm with the adapters. That means that if I only had the +10 diopter, I'd end up with a gap between 20cm and 10cm where I wouldn't be able to focus at all, but the +4 bridges that gap, and the other two give different options of focus lengths depending on the situation I'm in. For example, if I were taking photos of flowers I might want the +1 or +2 to be able to take some close up pics and some wide pics.
Anyway, the kit comes with a nifty carrying case and some lens wipes, so that's cool.
And the lenses themselves apparently have an antireflective optical coating, which is definitely helpful for reducing lens flares.
As a practical demonstration, let's try taking a picture of a PCB out of a Yamaha Reface DX. Because I happen to have one of those handy. Here's as close as I can get with just the regular lens.
Like sure, you can see stuff, and if you crop in you can get some pretty good detail, but you can't really make out what all the surface mount components are.
Adding the +1 adapter gets us a bit closer.
It's in no way a dramatic difference, but still gets things a bit closer.
Moving to the +2, things are starting to get closer still.
This is starting to look like a proper close-up photo.
And naturally, +4 brings things even closer.
And then +10, the closest of all.
With the obvious downside being that at this level of zoom the depth of focus is really quite tight. I actually had to take this picture 4 times to get the focal plane just right, as moving the camera even a few mm back and forth would shift the focus quite dramatically.
Oh yeah, speaking of the camera, I picked up a Lumix GF5.
It's entirely in Japanese, because they lock down the language packs to discourage cross-market shopping. So I guess that year of Japanese language study at university finally paid off. I actually picked this up a few months ago, but I couldn't figure out a good context to introduce it. So, here it is. It's pretty fun and delightfully tiny.
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