New Medical Camera the Size of a Grain of Salt

kkleiner writes "The German Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration recently reported the development of a camera with a lens attached that is 1 x 1 x 1.5 millimeters in size, which is roughly as big as a grain of salt. At about a cubic millimeter in size, this camera is right at the size limit that the human eye can see unaided. The camera not only produces decent images but is also very cheap to manufacture — so cheap, in fact, that it is considered disposable."

Comments

SI units fail?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know what would be more amazing. People confusing a 1mm cube for a "grain of salt", or people being unable to see a 1mm cube object without aid. That's like the size of a ball bearing, or short grain rice! I didn't realize SI units were this hard to grasp...

Insect Eyes

[Anonymous Coward]

Put enough of them together and we might be able to make a decent approximation of the faceted eyes of insects

In America....

[PCM2]

In the United States, where the hospital bills for a procedure of this kind are likely to run into thousands of dollars, "disposable" has a pretty broad definition.

Re:In America....

[fotbr]

Not if you can bill the customer more for the "latest and greatest".

Just because it costs health care providers less, that doesn't mean that you should expect it to cost YOU less.

Are you blind?

[Shin-LaC]

A cubic millimeter is hardly "at the size limit that the human eye can see unaided". A fleck of dust is quite a bit smaller than that, and perfectly visible.

Re:if they are so cheap....

[Samantha Wright]

1. The image is 250 x 250 px at 44 fps.
2. It's so tiny that there's no way it could have a useful FOV for anything macroscopic, much less be able to focus on anything more than a few cm away.
3. This is medical technology we're talking about, so there's probably a hundred-thousand licensing fee to even look at it, even if the camera itself is only a few pennies.