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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."
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.
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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....
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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.
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I want a telephoto adapter for my cell phone camera so I can use my cell phone as a tele-phone.
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]
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