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An Origami Lens for Your Camera Phone?
Roland Piquepaille writes "Your next camera phone might get a new kind of lens if researchers at the University of California at San Diego convince the cell phones makers. They have designed an 'origami lens' which will slim high resolution cameras. Today, their 5-millimeter thick, 8-fold imager delivers images comparable in quality with photos taken with a compact camera lens with a 38 millimeter focal length. In a few years, these bendable lenses could be used in high resolution miniature cameras for unmanned surveillance aircraft, cell phones and infrared night vision applications."
I can't see spending all that money on an iPhone unless it has this magic lens.
:-)
OK, just kidding there.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Those have been around for hundreds of years
It's a reflector. Don't ask me how it works, the story and illustrations aren't very clear. But it's not a lens, fresnel or otherwise.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Despite what the summary says, the "lense" isn't bendable. It just manages to compress a lot of light-bending capability into a small space by using reflective, rather than refractive optics and combining all the optics in a single crystal. I say "lense" because it's not refractive, so it's not really a lense.
pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory7
They have designed an 'origami lens' which will slim high resolution cameras.
What they don't mention is that they had to fold space/time to do it.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Imaging sensor chips are going to have to change too .. readout times need to increase so that we can have better dynamic range (in some applications) and overall much high FPS and frankly the only practical way I see that happening is by increasing the number of readout pins so that the chip surface area is divided into multiple (virtual) segments. That way the entire image can be read out much faster in parallel.
This looks pretty cool, but...
I see two disadvantages, and both of them relate to the fact that the light-gathering surface is now a donut.
The first is that the light-gathering ability is greatly reduced when compared so something else with the same width lens. On the plus side, if you are "shortening" your lens, you probably do not mind "fattening it up" in order to compensate. This also means that the lens cover on your cell phone cam will be bigger, so you have a larger area to get scratched, a larger area to wipe fingerprints off of before shooting, etc. No big whoop, but something to be aware of.
The second is that blurry objects tend to blur in the shape of the aperature. The classic picture of this is taking a picture of your sweetie standing in front of a Christmas tree covered with white lights. With a conventional lens, if the Christmas lights are blurry, they will tend to be little fuzzy circles. With the new lens, they will be little glowing fuzzy donuts. So this is probably not what you want for portrait work.
Still pretty cool, though. It will be interesting to see how this develops.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
And don't get me started on the quality of the Britney/Paris upskirt pics....
ACK NAK RST
Reflective telephoto lenses have been around for SLRs and movie cameras for ages. They are lightweight and produce nice "halos" for out-of-focus highlights such as light shimmering off of a lake or ocean in the background.
This technology can make such lenses much smaller and lighter and potentially much cheaper, allowing serious amateurs to add extreme telephotos to their camera bag without blowing their budget or lugging around heavy equipment.
Exactly how is focusing accomplished? Moving the reflector plane back and forth? Is it a conventional optic that it has fixed focal distance? Just curious.
This is actually nothing like a Fresnel lens. Fresnel lenses are based on refraction and tend to give horrible image quality since they have a whole bunch of concentric rings.
You misspelled "burn the shit out of stuff"
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Something else to think about... cost of manufacture. If this is designed for small form factor it is most likely going into consumer electronics. If you are dropping several hundred bucks on a digital SLR you don't mind a big lens. Cost becomes an issue with $100 mass produced Taiwanese gadgets. This seems like it will cost a helluva lot more than a simple plastic standard lens. That only leaves a small market for expensive cameras with form factor restrictions. Or so it seems.
Silulu. Hot Polynesian Geek Chick.
Canon has been doing this for a while, though it doesn't seem to be very compelling in SLR lenses. They are smaller, but Canon is charging quite a lot for that convenience and the optics don't seem to be quite up to the standards of their more-popular cousins.
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http://www.usa.canon.com/consumer/controller?act=
http://www.usa.canon.com/consumer/controller?act=
I want a telephoto adapter for my cell phone camera so I can use my cell phone as a tele-phone.
Sorry, for some reason when I read "reflective" optics I thought "diffractive" for some reason. My mistake.
I'm not sure if I want something like this if it means it comes in at f11 or the like. Who wants a cameraphone that you can only use on sunny days, has a flash range that's measured in nanometers or comes with an ISO rating that requires scientific notation?
*IF* this can turn in f stops close to or equal to prime focus lenses or good quality zooms, for a reasonable price, then I'm interested. All those 75-300mm f5.6-f8 (or worse) lenses are useless, IMO, even with today's faster ISO chips/films. Gimme my old 180mm f2.8 any day.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
And don't get me started on the quality of the Britney/Paris upskirt pics....
The posts above and below yours mention how this kind of lens will produce a halo around out of focus highlights. Come on, who wouldn't want to see a naked, wrinkled beaver with a halo? OH GOD I JUST PICTURED IT! BLEACH! I NEED BLEACH FOR MY BRAIN!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Couldn't you just use a holographic lens to give you a flat, flexible lens? Granted, there are resolution limits for holographic lenses, but I bet they still exceed the resolution limits of the CCD in a cameraphone.
this is for sure an interesting movement. an old system (from the time of renaissance, IIRC) rediscovered and implemented with modern means.
what i find really interesting is how such a crystoptical system (origami lens sounds misleading and quite wrong, sorry) behaves in phase contrast transformation... if it's just mirrors of molecular thikness layers, then i would think that even aberrations can be eliminated... and this would lead not only to cheap mini-objectives but also to excellent reproducing objectives for professional photography... especially in the wide-lens range, where good optical systems are hard to make.
I see two disadvantages, and both of them relate to the fact that the light-gathering surface is now a donut.
Donuts... Is there anything they can't do?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Here is one of many greasemonkey script to remove piquepaille stories
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/5735/ [userscripts.org]
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
I thought the liquid lens was going to be revolutionizing the cellphone camera market? What are the image quality pros/cons between these two technologies?
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
They are only going to use the Diamond cutter to produce the master for the molded glass lenses. After the master is created cost of molding a plastic reflective imager is pretty much the same as cost of molding a plastic lens. They do need more software but we all know software is free as in beer Right?
**Life is too short to be serious**
bumpy bump bump
I remember seeing a guy on the local news who made a lens like that, maybe not exactly the same but I know it folded into very small sections. I know he was a University student in Halifax somewhere, but seeing that there are dozens of Universities in Halifax that's a bit vague.
With a name such as Tremblay (a very common East coast Canadian name) it's probably the same guy, maybe he moved to the US.
This lens has the same problem as any lens-system with a central obstruction; the contrast for medium-scale detail is poor, due to diffraction effects.
Image quality is generally specified using a concept called Modulation Transfer Function (MTF). It is like a frequency response for lenses except the frequency is spatial in cycles per mm rather than Hertz.
Lenses with a central obstruction can have comparable MTF with respect to unobstructed lenses of the same speed, at spatial frequencies near the limit of resolution. However, you try very hard not to use a lens that way because the performance is poor. At the more important, intermediate spatial frequencies, an unobstructed lens has much better performance.
Astronomers have picked up on this idea. They like to use reflective lenses with a central obstruction for viewing stars where resolution limit is the only thing that counts and the perfect colour correction provides an advantage. However, unobstructed refractors are better for planets where you have a distributed image.
It is possible to make reflective telescopes without a central obstruction but the technology is still a little expensive. I expect, one day, they will displace refractors.
Aliasing is another issue using a centrally-obstructed lens with a pixellated image sensor like a CCD or CMOS device. Spatial frequencies above the Nyquist limit (2 pixels per cycle) generate garbage within the pass-band of the detector. A lens of this type concentrates its performance in the worst frequency range for the detector.
There are lots of promising approaches for cheap, compact lenses for cell-phone cameras but I doubt this lens is one of them.
The article didn't make one advantage very clear: since all colors of light are reflected identically, reflective optics can completely avoid chromatic aberration. This is precisely why Isaac Newton invented the reflective telescope. One reason that a good camera lens is heavy and expensive is because it combines elements with different refractive indices to try to minimize chromatic aberration.
The lens is cut out of a crystal: What could we do with the piezo-electric effect on that crystal? Would it deform it enough to make the focus adjustable?
(The Piezo-electric effect, for those who came in late, is the deforming of a crystal when an electric charge is placed across it. It is used in some earpieces, some tweeters, and most buzzers used in computers. The reverse also occours: stress a crystal and a voltage is created. This is used in 'electret' microphone inserts.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
Camera makers should just change the orientation of their lenses, as Panasonic recently did with one of their models. I'd be surprised if their new approach gives more bang for the buck than that. Most cameras/phones have PLENTY of physical depth, it's just not used because of the way camera sensors are oriented.
omfg. this is just what i need most in my life. a better quality camera in my cell phone.
no really, i need to take professional quality images WITH MY PHONE.
--p.
The front page posting is wrong.
No cellphone camera has 38mm real focal lenght. They have focal length of about 5mm, which for 1/3" sensor gives same field of vision than 38mm in film camera.
This 5mm focal length lens is really not very big, but it does not have a very good aperture ( ie. area from where to gather light ).
The new "origami lens" does not make lenses smaller, but gives them bigger aperture.
There is however one very big drawbck in this design:
The "bokeh", ie form of out-of-focus softening is very ugly for mirror-typy lenses.
A dot focused correctly looks like dot.
A dot focused incorrectly with cheap traditional lens looks like soft filled rectangle, or soft filledpentagon.
A dot focused incorrectly with good traditional lens looks like soft filled hexagon or soft filled circle.
A dot focused incorrectly with mirror-lens(ie. this new origami lens) will look like a donut or tire.
(in this case maybe like tire of bicycle)
So except to see the background of the image full of circles..
Also the depth of good focus will be MUCH smaller with this lens, so there are much more out-of-focus stuff in pictures.
I wanted a usable (f/8-f/11) 500mm telephoto for my film camera, but didn't have $6000 to spend on a high end one.
Wound up getting an old Reflex-Nikkor through ebay back when it was still somewhat honest.
My experience was that under the best conditions (bright light, no point sources), everything looks kind of muddy.
Other times--ex. shooting geese on a pond--the points of light reflecting off of the waves show up as hundreds of little donuts.
For it's size, the lens in the diagram has a much larger central obstruction--it's almost the whole lens.
Unless there's some funny business going on, I don't expect this to take a decent photo.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
Catadoptric, or mirror lenses, are almost universally regarded as having abominable bokeh, which is why they're virtually never used. It's a subjective concept to be sure, but I'd say at leat 99% of pros and serious amateurs, people with an eye for these things, find the "donuts" of light to be nothing but horribly harsh, jarring, and distracting.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
look up Catadioptric lenses... here. All they've done here is folded the light path a few more times... still the same concept though.
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
I knew I was going to get in trouble for that witty remark. I even added "OK, just kidding there. :-)" so that the knuckle draggers amongst you might feel the Whump! of the clue stick. Alas, you plainly did not read the entire remark. Sigh.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.