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Liquid Lens Can Magnify at the Flick of a Switch
An anonymous reader writes "German engineers have designed the first liquid camera lens with no moving parts that provides two levels of zoom. 'Liquid lenses bend light using the curved boundary between watery and oily liquids. When the two liquids are held in the right container, the boundary between them can be made to curve in a way that focuses light simply by applying a voltage. Liquid lenses have attracted much attention because they are potentially smaller than conventional optics and cheaper to build. Samsung has already built them into some cellphones.'"
Nothing to see here. Move along.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
A guy did this at Bell Labs 2 years ago, and around the same time so did some French company that was going to put them in cell phones.
If I shake it before snapping a photo, do I get a really cool bubble-like effect ?
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
This immediately reminded me of a talk I saw recently by Guoqiang Li from U. of Arizona. They're using liquid crystal lenses to make glasses with variable focusing power as a function of applied voltage. You could flip a switch to be able to see near or far - so if you're near-sighted but getting to the age where reading glasses would help, you're the touch of a button away.
m l
Liquid zoom is quite cool too, but thought this related enough to pass on.
fyi:
http://pubs.acs.org/cen/news/84/i15/8415lenses.ht
(PNAS citation in article)
Getting diabetes AND salmonella would be a bad weekend.
It sure would have made fixing the Hubble a lot easier.
Earth to Hubble: Adjust lens voltage to 1.537mV.
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
With better lenses we might see that this is a dup. These were reported in the media, and slashdot, a year or so back.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
If it contains liquid?
...could you somehow have a lens with multiple focus points? I'm thinking if you have 4 people in a picture you could focus on each of their faces with one lens and have a nice picture with everyone in focus rather than someone in the background a bit blurry.
Wouldn't the curving of the liquid layers be considered a moving part?
Would be neat to have this on glasses or something like that. Your glasses can double as reading/seeing glasses, if you need a different prescription or something for different activities. I imagine it wouldn't take much power, just charge them when you go to sleep or something.
First of all, you misspelled "Nabors".
Secondly, I'm as big a fan of Gomer Pyle as the next guy, but I think spying on Jim Nabors (much less calling him "your" Nabors) is a little over the top.
i might be wrong, in fact, very likely to be wrong, but wouldn't applying voltage cause hydrogen, or other gasses to be released from the water, and thus reduce the life span of the lens if it has to do much refocusing? and even so, wouldnt the released gasses interfere with the focusing?
Why UNIX?
This liquid lens technology sounds like it might really help create tiny and cheap cameras that people can use to bring more justice to the world.
It seems that police brutality is getting so common now that they are willing to beat members of the media on camera . (The clip begins with the narrator suggesting that the protestors were "asking for it" by throwing rocks at the police, but they can't spin the footage of their own camerapeople getting beaten up.)
What's worse, is that police now tend to focus on people with cameras , as you can also see in the above video.
The tapes are very helpful in prosecuting police misconduct , so we neeed more people taping.
Otherwise, the police tend to lie about the incidents , even going so far to claim in the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes in Britain that 5 different cameras watching the action were all somehow not functioning .
In a Missouri case, a teenager was being harassed by the police at a DUI checkpoint for not telling them where he was going -- when he asked why he was being detained, he was told If you don't stop running your mouth, we're going to find a reason to lock you up tonight.
Stuff like this happens all the time, and it will be a great day when we can start getting more of it on tape. Then the police can keep policing the citizens, but the citizens can also police the police.
I bought a canon sd600 a few months ago, and it died on my second glamis trip. Sand (from the air, it was never dropped) ruined the lense. So I bought an Optio W30 instead. No moving parts to get sand in.
So if this is such old news, why don't cameras use this technology? Because then they would last too long?
from here: In the Philosophical Transactions (Abridged), Volume 4, 1694-1702 pp. 97-101 + 1 plate, there is an article by Stephen Gray on "Microscopical Observations and Experiments" in which Mr. Gray explains the making of a water microscope.
I believe one of the early English astronomical refractor telescopes (one of William Herschel's iirc, possibly the 20-foot one) had a lens made of two hemispherical pieces of glass filled with white wine.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Thanks, but I think I'll stick with Nikon's ED glass and mechanical movement. The liquid lens might work for cheap crappy images, but real photographers are amazingly picky about their glass. We buy into a lens system - the camera is just an accessory to the lens.
Place nail here >+
Depth of field just means that sharpness decreases more or less gradually for points at planes parallel to the plane of focus, so that if you aperture is small enough, you get acceptable practical sharpness at a range of distances from the lens, and not just at the plane of focus.
The crucial thing is that by using depth of field, you have the following limitations:
What the GP proposed could, conceivably, not have those limitations (I don't know for sure). It would be hella harder to use, though.
Are you adequate?
They have them now. The going price for them in is the neighborhood of Six Million Dollars.
What, there are several of us, now ?
P.S.: Hint: look at my username
I first read that as "liquor lens" and thought somebody had finally made a working pair of beer goggles...
This is not my sandwich.
Panasonic makes a lot of cameras under their Lumix brand. All of them use conventional glass lenses. Panasonic cameras, especially the FZ series and the L-1, are known for having high-quality lenses, but they don't involve any magic.
What you may be thinking of is optical image stabilization, a movable element in the lens that shifts to compensate for jitter, reducing the need for a tripod. All Lumix cameras incorporate this.
And here are some Dutch guys doing it 3 years ago:
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/print/4172Buffalo.
Shades of Grayden