Gavff Dug Up Nyko's Forgotten 8x Zoom Lens for the Nintendo DSi, Then Pointed the DSi at the Moon

“Believe it or not… this is an optical zoom lens that was created for the DSi in 2009 by a company called “Nyko”.” That’s the first line of gavff’s video, and it’s a fair reaction. The DSi’s cameras were, in his words later, “just cheap, low-resolution cameras,” and here was a company selling glass for one.

Nyko’s own pitch, as it ran on Gaming Nexus in October 2009, called the Zoom Case “a protective case with an 8x zoom lens for the DSi” that “significantly magnifies the handheld’s external camera.” The case was the mount, and “The zoom lens easily locks onto the Zoom Case.” The price was $24.99. Nyko’s marketing director said it was “perfect for the growing suite of social networking capabilities available on the platform,” which in 2009 meant uploading DSi photos straight to Facebook.

Gavff’s take is that the timing was smart and the sales weren’t. “Given the lack of information online about this thing and the mixed reception online at the time I’d say… no.”

The comparison he keeps coming back to is the iPhone. “The iPhone 3GS didn’t have digital zoom at all on its release date,” he points out, and it had no flash either. The DSi could have both, with a lens from Nyko and MadCatz’s “Flash Photo Pak,” a flash that plugs into the charge port and presses the L button for you. His unit never fired: “I could never actually get it to flash.” He left it switched on instead and shot in a pitch-black room. All this from a handheld with, in his numbers, “about 90% less megapixels and about 68% less resolution” than the phone.

The lens fought back. “Nyko only ever released this for the original DSi. I only have a DSi XL, well, LL, same difference. So we’ll need to do some modifications.” The modifications are visible in the video, and he rates them himself: “Now, if that isn’t professional engineering, then I don’t know what is.” Once mounted, the zoom is real, but framing is the hard part, because the DSi’s low-resolution screen makes it tough to tell whether anything is in focus.

He tried video too. A homebrew DSi recorder he found freezes after about a second, and the only other DSi video tool he knows is “I Am In the Movie,” a DSiWare recorder and editor that came out in 2014, very late in the console’s life.

Play the video on YouTube

Then comes what he calls “the worst idea ever.” He frames it as a question he expects from viewers: “Gavff, did you buy a huge expensive telescopic camera lens just to try and take a photo of the moon using a DSi for three hours straight, just for the small section of the video?” His answer is “uh- n- no?” followed immediately by the photos. “Here’s a photo of the moon using a DSi without the lens, and then here it is with the lens! This was extremely difficult to frame and focus correctly, and even then, the autofocus on the DSi isn’t great, so it’s a bit overexposed. But hey, you can still see some detail.”

For contrast, he put the same lens on his iPhone 15 and shot a video with it. His verdict on the modern side: “Dude, post-processing on phones are just- it’s just crazy nowadays.”

The bigger idea is the alternate timeline. If the lens had taken off, he argues, Nintendo might have taken the 3DS camera more seriously, the way Apple slowly turned every iPhone launch into a camera launch. “Could you imagine “shot on 3DS” commercials? I don’t think it’s that far-fetched.” More of his projects live on his site.