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

I take it as...

[madsenj37]

"Suited to a wide range of optical imaging applications, including digital cameras." I take this to mean that it is not ready for precision applications and that it may not be. either way, this will take time to get any better

Applications to Eyewear

[zalas]

Would it be possible to adapt this type of lens to eyewear by enlarging the size? Instead of using bifocals or trifocals, you might be able to have just one lens that changes shape according to a microcontroller, which is then hooked to either a button, or perhaps tapped into a nerve, which can then be trained to send the appropriate signals.

Re:Applications to Eyewear

[jpampuch]

Getting larger probably has constraints, though using different solutions may provide some flexibility in size. Gravity alone would probably have a big impact on 'eyewear' sized lenses.

I'd guess that the going much smaller is constrained by capillary action.

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.

Skepticism?

[screwballicus]

Look at their demonstration photo and ask yourself. Lens the size of the tip of its developer's finger?

Or developer with a finger...the size of a camera's lens!

You be the judge.

This is the last time I fall for the grotesquely-oversized-finger demonstration trick. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice...

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.

Artificial Eyes?

[chendo]

Could this be a step for manufacturing artificial eyes? Being able to actually zoom in with my eyes would be cool, and if it has NekkidVision(TM), it would be even better :)

Re:Fixing Eyes With it

[richie2000]

astigmatism, (wildly popular)

I don't know about that, I'm not that thrilled about mine. It's actually quite unpopular and not really likely to get voted 'most popular affliction' any time soon. On the other hand, it's rather common.

Good for photography...maybe

[mikeophile]

Modern photographic lenses have special coatings to reduce reflections from the air gap between two lenses.

For single lens cameras, no coatings are not that big a problem.

For multiple lens cameras, it can lead to a lot of chromatic aberations.

If these oil lenses can accept liquid optical layers, look out Karl Zeiss.

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.

Stop saying "no moving parts", please

[SuperBanana]

Make a lense without moving parts

Everyone keeps saying this. I looked at the diagram, and at least one part of the lens moves. That's a moving part, folks. Stop saying it "has no moving parts".

Now, here are some predictions:

• They'll still break. Electrodes will corrode. Membranes will rupture. Say they discover after extended operation that the first units put a little too much voltage through the lens or something. You get the idea.
• Materials used, such as the membranes, will age. Either becoming stiff, brittle, or simply change properties enough that the lens doesn't focus the way it was supposed to
• the curve won't be as perfect as everyone is hyping and initial cameras will have excessively blurry images, or images that are blurry in parts but not others due to inconsistencies in high-volume manufacturing of the membranes(think LCD screen "acceptable bad pixel count")
• light loss will be significant. Whereas in the glass optics field we have multicoated lenses that are incredibly efficient, none of those coatings could be applied to the materials on this lens, and furthermore, you've got(for each element) 4 surfaces, not two, for light to pass through.
• Color balance will be odd despite calibration efforts, and will change as the fluid/membranes age(probably from UV exposure).
• It will be useless on anything other than consumer point&shoots. The sensor on a Canon 10D DSLR for example is almost twice the width of that prototype they showed, and uses lenses 2-3x larger still.

Re:Stop saying "no moving parts", please

[AaronStJ]

You're right, early prototypes of this product will be flawed. In fact, early prototypes of any new invention will undoubtably have flaws. Nothing new should be invented. Ever. Faced with the fact that nothing will be perfect the first try, we should never innovate or try anything new.

Thank you for showing us the light.