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New Digital Camera Lens Made of Liquid
Clarinase writes "101reviews is running an article about a new type of camera lens called Fluidlens. This patented lens made of liquid is no bigger than a contact lens, but can still achieve up to 10 times optical zoom by changing its shape similar to the human eye."
BTW, I checked, all the links in the original article still work.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
No it is NOT!
morcego
Lens size is correlated with the amount of light captured by the lens, and not the size of the image.
In fact, for a long time hobbyists have played around with "pin-hole" cameras, cameras that, well, have a pin hole in the place of a lens. The light diffracts throught the small hole, spreading out and thus blowing up the image.
Really expensive lenses such as you'd see in telescopes are big so they can get the maximum amount of light.
For a neat demonstration of this principle, take some binoculars and cover half of one lens. You'll notice that-- surprise, surprise-- you still see the entire image!
So, in the end, the lens diameter will allow you to take pictures in lower light situations. Which might well equate to better picture quality if you're not in bright, shiny daylight since the picture will be acquired faster with less chance for motion blur.
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No it's not. It has some similarities, such as having no regular arangement in its atoms, but unlike a liquid, which have no strong forces holding the molecules together, glass is held solid by strong chemical bonds almost as if it were one giant molecule. Glass does not flow at room temperature, the defects you see in old glass windows are not because it has been flowing slowly over the past century but are due to the manufacturing process in creating those windows.
Glass has a viscosity (at room temp) of aproximately 10 to the 20th power poises while water (to give you a reference point) is about 0.01 poise.
Oh and if you think that because you can use the term viscosity when refering to glass that it is a liquid I should let you know that lead has an estimated viscosity of 10 to the 11th power poises.
Take a look at some of the oldest glass structures we have, Stained glass windows in some of the worlds ancient cathederals. If your 100 year old house shows much distortion do to flow imagine what an 800 year old stained glass window should look like, except it doesn't.
Glass does not flow at room temperature.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
I was under the impression that squinting, like the sungalsses you mention, do not filter scattered light, but rather artifically reduce the aperture of you lens, increasing the depth of field. The result is that an object which is not at the image plane is more likely to be "in focus", thus relieving your eye from needing to focus to that point. It's particularly good for astigmatism, as the small aperture compensates for the cylidrical portion of the lens. The down side is that you lose total light collection.
Note that the opposite is true, as well. When your iris is at its largerst aperture (at night, in dim lighting), your vision will be at its worst.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
This is not 'real' inovation, they've been using the technique in Arfrica for years as a cheep way of producing glasses.
I coudln't find any info on google but I'm fairly sure they were invented by the wind up radio guy.
or if your really after pior art, it looks like the Greeks may have beaten them to it by 3000 years.
Here's an encarta link too
thank God the internet isn't a human right.