Slashdot Mirror
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
I have yet to master the art of 10x zoom by changing the shape of my eye ..
So can you distract a party by yelling, "Nobody move! I've dropped my camera lens."
Being able to get good image quality in tiny cameras is becoming increasingly useful because of the adoption of cameras into phones and similarly small devices. The amount of times I've see something I want to take a picture of, but don't have my camera is pretty significant, and I've found that since getting a camera phone its filled this void nicely. Being able to get a high quality image from a phone would be a great step forward for those who are using phone cameras for this kind of role. (Especially as the amount of storage available increases)
Business Voyeur
"OIL LENS: hufuf oil held in static tension by an enclosing force field within a viewing tube as part of a magnifying or other light-manipulation system. Because each lens element can be adjusted individually one micron at a time, the oil lens is considered the ultimate in accuracy for manipulating visual light." -- DUNE, "Terminology of the Imperium."
This is right up there with those relatively small, sealed nuclear reactors, IMHO. Neat.
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.
www.eissq.com/BandP.html Ball and Plate System. Amuse your friends. Crush your enemies.
Incorrect. Squinting acts as a filter for scattered light (kind of like how those showboxes with the pinholes in them allow you to see an eclipse).
There was a guy a number of years back who sold "sunglasses guarenteed to improve your sight!" and all it was was a opaque plastic lens with hundreds of tiny holes in it.
To do any kind of zooming, you need 2 lenses, I believe, otherwise it's just a shift in focal points.
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?
I'm certainly no expert on photography, but it seems to me that the maximum resolution doesn't have much to do with the size of the lens.
Maximum resolution has quite a lot to do with the size of the lens.
Sure, you can make a sensor with 50 million pixels on it, but if the resolution of the image coming through the lens only carries an equivalent of 1,000 or so lines horizontally and vertically, you're just going to be getting a very large file, not a high-resolution one.
(This is the scam already happening with a lot of 7mp and up consumer-level digicams - they just do not have the optics required to pass that level of detail.)
The larger a lens is, the more light it can let through. And that's all an image is to a camera - light. On film, that light hits the crystals contained in the celluloid and chemically excites them, whereas on a digital sensor the light is converted to binary data representing the image. In both cases, though, light is all that matters.
Bigger lenses can obviously gather more light, which means they can be used in lower-light situations or at longer focal lengths (longer focal lengths involve more light fall-off inside the lens, so it helps for extreme telephoto lenses to have massive front elements). It also means the sensor does not need to have its gain cranked up so high to compensate for a smaller lens. And it means the sensor itself can be larger, which in itself will allow greater resolution.
Probably the most important thing, though, is that larger lenses can more easily achieve perfect focus. It is possible for a lens to be simply unable to achieve perfect focus - the light beams will just never converge properly. This is not an exact science - every lens is slightly different in this (even among the same model), but larger lenses can come closer because they're dealing with the same projected image size but have more incoming light with which to deal and larger elements that can be built to stricter relative tolerances. This has the greatest effect on real resolution, and it's why some lenses appear tack-sharp and others look a bit soft.
Relatedly, the larger the lens, the less effect manufacturing tolerances are going to have on quality. For example, say an element can be ground to within 0.001mm of spec and still be within that spec. If you shrink the lens down by 100 times and you can still only manage a 0.001mm tolerance, you will not have any real consistency in quality. You would have to similarly up your manufacturing tolerances by 100 times just to maintain the quality of the larger lens.
This is even ignoring all the image defects you get from smaller lenses. Photographic lenses usually have 6 or more elements inside them to correct for various distortions that the curved glass introduces; obviously this is going to be a lot more difficult to do the smaller you go, and I can't see how a lens with liquid inside is really going to be able to simulate this. It might be able to replicate one or two interior elements (even though liquid is infinitely maleable, it can still only be one shape at a time) but I would imagine there will always be distortions left over.
You may ask how our eyes work so well, then, given how small they are. Well, for one thing, our eyes are "prime" lenses - they don't have an optical zoom function. For another, we have a big, powerful brain sitting behind them to interpret what we're looking at and correct any oddities (the image your eyes are actually seeing and the image you interpret are not even close to being the same thing). The fact that we've got two of them doesn't hurt either - it's not just about depth perception, just close one eye and see how good your vision is for a while. Peripheral vision will be cut, it is harder to focus, etc. Your brain does a good job of taking these two images and combining them, making it easier to see. Having two eyes also means we have double the light gathering ability.
Also, many people's eyes *don't* work so well.
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.
Nobody knows. Liquid lens.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?