Philips Develops Fluid Lenses

Lars T. writes "Digital Photography Review has a short report indicating: 'Philips Research at the CeBIT exhibition is demonstrating a unique variable-focus lens system that has no mechanical moving parts. Suited to a wide range of optical imaging applications, including digital cameras.' Here is Philips' press release and the Heise News article (in German) where I first heard about it. The latter also mentions that Philips has recently used the same electrowetting effect in an 'ePaper' display prototype."

Comments

New Scientist mentioned something similiar

[Ckwop]

There was an article in New Scientist a few weeks ago about a lense that changed it's focus in response to an electric current, iirc.

It was made of some plastic and I think the current changed the density of the plastic at some point in the structure in order to change the focus.

Of course, the aim was the same: "Make a lense without moving parts" - these guys must have developed a better solution because the Lense was very poor in the NS article.

Simon.

News?

[Afrob]

I remember that fluid lenses have been used by holographers for a long time, because they can be of quite high quality even with large diameter. Vari*lite also uses fluid lenses in some of their intelligent lighting fixtures.
The News here is that the Philips lens can be focused by an electric field with no part moving other then the lens. The size of their prototype is tiny; IMHO they need at least to triple the size of it to make it useful for digital cameras.

Re:The lens diagrams are wrong.

[photonic]

I guess you where sleeping your way through the optics lectures: These lenses could definitely work. If you look at the picture
you see that there are two fluids: brown one on top and a blue one on the bottom. If you remember Snell's law (ray bends towards the normal in the denser medium), you can conclude from the picture that the 'brown' fluid has a higher refractive index than the 'blue' fluid. The left picture thus resembles a hollow/concave/negative lens and the right picture resembles a convex/positive lens. Of these the positive (on the right) can be used to form a real image (one you can capture on a CCD or a retina), whereas the negative only forms a virtual image.

A colleague of mine did his internship at the group that invented these and my boss still works part-time at Philips.