Zoom Lens

Your desktop isn't just a space to arrange icons and keep a pretty wallpaper hanging. With the right tools you can completely transform it into a workstation that meets your demands. For closeup and better analysis, Zoom Lens, as the name suggests, aims to show you greater detail of elements on screen through magnifying.

At its core, the purpose is similar, if not the same as the Windows tool put at your disposal, namely the magnifier. The application comes in a light package, not even requiring an installation to properly run. Unlike the Windows tool, you can simply take this one on a USB Flash drive to use on the go.

Launching the application brings up a control panel, as well as the lens, centered on your mouse cursor. Customization and flexibility don't provide much variety in choice, but cover enough to make the whole experience comfortable and somewhat practical.

By adjusting different sliders, you can set the level of transparency of lens, as well as the zoom level, which can be up to ten times the normal view. The lens can be made taller, shorter, wider or narrower by pressing the homonimous buttons.

However, it seems that regardless of the slider positions and options you pick, implementation of the magnifier is only practical for the first half of a second. This is because multiple zoom layers are used, overlapping each other and creating the tunnel effect that results in a poor image or simple color of a pixel.

On the other hand, with the right transparency level and big enough magnifying area, the application can provide a neat effect when navigating on different websites, especially if populated with pictures. However, this doesn't make the rest of the issues go away or restore any of its practicality, mostly because of poor quality feedback and refresh rate. This last detail can be changed, but be careful not to leave the value null, otherwise you crash the application for good.

All things considered, we come to the conclusion that Zoom Lens is packed with potential but stands a bit far from the greatness it wants to achieve. This is mostly because of the interesting, but incredibly frustrating and impractical zoom method based on layers. The set of features is shallow, with no extra tools at least for color selection or saving an image of the specific region, not to mention functionality issues that quickly make you look for alternatives.