Carrying a magnifying glass with you at all times can be a nuisance, but if you have less than perfect eyesight a magnifying device will be a real life saver in many situations, especially if you forget to put in your contact lenses. Fortunately for iPhone users, a variety of magnifying apps make it possible to enhance the text or imagery on just about anything. As long as you’re carrying your phone, you’ll also have a magnifying glass. While they’re not a permanent substitution for contact lenses or glasses, these iPhone apps can certainly help you out in a bind.
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1. Over 40
This app for iPhone lets you magnify things up to 10 times their normal size using a sliding bar which allows you to manually adjust the zoom in just a few seconds. By default, a graphic of a magnifying glass appears on the screen, and you can zoom in on the image that appears inside the glass. If you want to use the entire iPhone screen to magnify something, just go into contact lens mode. Users who have an iPhone model 4 or later with a camera flash can use the flash to illuminate whatever they’re looking at for 10 seconds, making it even easier to read the text that’s being magnified.
2. SRC Magnifier
This magnifying app for iPhone temporarily enlarges text or images, and lets you use your phone’s flash to illuminate things for even more clarity. The application has an auto focus feature, so text won’t appear blurry if you have a hard time holding your phone perfectly steady. SRC Magnifier only lets you zoom in at pre-set levels of 2, 4, or 6 times, so you can’t manually adjust the zoom to just the right level, but you still have a few zoom options. One of the cooler features of this app is that you can hook it up to Apple TV and project your images in high definition to a HD TV, provided your iPhone is 4S or newer.
3. Lumin
Lumin is a magnifying app that not only lets you see a zoomed image in the present moment, but also saves a history of magnified images so you can refer back to them later. In order to save an image in your history, you just use the image lock feature. Once an image is locked on the screen, it can be magnified even further. This app also lets you send these saved images over email or social media, such as Facebook and Instagram. Lumin lets you use your iPhone camera flash to illuminate the image you capture, and you can zoom in up to 10 times the normal size of something.
All of these iPhone apps are useful for just about anyone, but especially people who use eye glasses or contact lenses to help with eyesight. Download the apps from the App Store on your iPhone device, or get them in the iTunes program on your computer and then sync your iPhone to iTunes to add the app to your device.
Jack Douglas is an iPhone app developer. He likes staying on top of the latest advancements in apps for eyesight and sharing his findings on various eyesight blogs. Learn more about ordering contact lenses online, visit the Lenstore.