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

You have to take this announcement...

[MrEricSir]

...with a grain of salt.

(But watch out, that grain of salt might be a tiny camera.)

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...

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:Are you blind?

[MozeeToby]

It depends how far away your eye is from it. The claim stands.

Then you could make the same claim for anything.

"US Navy reveals a a new battleship that is smaller than the human eye can see*

*if the human is 5 million miles away from said battleship"

Reasonably, 'at the size limit the human eye can see' to me means exactly that. There is a size below which you can't see unaided, no matter how close you bring your eye to the object because there's a limit to how closely your eye can focus. That size is at least one, and probably 2 orders of magnitude smaller than this camera.

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.