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

Misleading Summary

[tunabomber]

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.

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.

Great

[Mogster]

From TFA

"This type of miniature camera is very promising for applications where you want high resolution images and a short exposure time. This describes what cell phone cameras want to be when they grow up," said Ford. "Today's cell phone cameras are pretty good for wide angle shots, but because space constraints require short focal length lenses, when you zoom them in, they're terrible. They're blurry, dark, and low contrast." Great! Now we'll actually be able see the detail in the bloodshot eyes and puke dribbling down the side of the mouth of the clowns posting their latest drunken nightly outing on Flikr & YouTube. Those dark blurry images really put me off.

And don't get me started on the quality of the Britney/Paris upskirt pics....

who cares about image quality?

[User 956]

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"

Telephoto Adapter

[Anonymous Coward]

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

ObSimpsons

[sconeu]

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?

Here is how to get rid of Roland Piquepaille

[viking80]

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