The Online Association of Photographers: Quick Tip: You Can Use an Old Phone’s LCD Screen as a Cheap Polarizing Filter

Friday, 7 October 2016

Quick Tip: You Can Use an Old Phone’s LCD Screen as a Cheap Polarizing Filter

Here’s a simple tip that’ll come in particularly handy for the smartphone photographers out there: you can use an old phone’s LCD screen as a cheap, portable polarizing filter.

The tip comes to us from the Koldunov Brothers—the same guys behind this interesting “daylight control system”—who’ll spend a few minutes showing you how an LCD screen from an old cellphone can be placed in front of your smartphone’s lens and used as a makeshift polarizing filter.

Sure, it’s not going to give you the kind of quality you expect from a high end polarizer for your DSLR lenses, but it’ll still help kill reflections, darken skies, increase contrast, and cut through haze. Not bad for something you can probably find lying around in some forgotten corner of your storage room.