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."

Comments

Cool, but...

[harrkev]

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.

Same tech can be used on SLRs

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Sure, but at what price in quality?

[Hawthorne01]

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.