Liquid Lenses For Camera Phones

Roland Piquepaille writes "In this article, the Register writes that "camera phones will soon have lenses made from nothing more substantial than a couple of drops of oil and water, but will still be capable of auto focusing, and even zooming in on subjects." The lenses, developed by the French company Varioptic, contain drops of oil and water, acting respectively as conductor and insulator, and sandwiched between two windows. These liquid lenses could replace glass or plastic ones because of several advantages: no moving parts, leading to better reliability; a very small power consumption; very small dimensions (diameter: 8mm; thickness: 2mm); and a very fast response time of 2/100th of a second. You can expect the first camera phones using these liquid lenses as early as Christmas 2005. These lenses might also appear in medical equipment, such as endoscopes, optical networking equipment or surveillance devices. This overview contains other details and references."

Comments

speed

[kaleco]

2/100ths of a second? That's much faster than those common-as-muck 1/50ths ones.

Liquid Lenses Rock!

[Gilesx]

I love liquid lenses. I often indulge in testing sessions where upon I don my own pair of "liquid lenses" by drinking 8 pints. It's sooo cool how it makes all the ugly chicks look like Jennifer Aniston!

Re:Space lens

[harrkev]

At small scales, drops appear spherical. But I am not sure that this would scale well. I would imagine that at some point (probably around 1mL) the surface would deviate from spherical enough to cause problems. AFAIK, most things in space need big lenses, so it might not be suitable.

Also, could this type of contraption survive launch? Itallian dressing is oil and water. But if you shake the bottle really hard...

Hey. Wait a second.... They patented Itallian Dressing!!!!!