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When will this ready to replace my 35mm, full frame camera? :D

• regularfry 9y ago
  He's talking about an optical phased array system. Once it's working, competing with a 35mm system "should" (famous last words) be a matter of scaling up the number of elements to match the lens size. The thing is, once that happens, it's got a huge advantage: it doesn't need any other lenses. At all. Any "lens" you could want is a software configuration away.
  • dingo_bat 9y ago
    But is that true? What if I want a 50x zoom lens? How would software do what an entire assembly of precision lenses does?
    • regularfry 9y ago
      It's not so much that software does what the lenses do, it's that software would configure the hardware to perform the same transfer function on the incoming photons. It's more a reconfiguration of the input than a processing of the output. On edit: I should also point out that you don't get to escape fundamental optical limits with this stuff. You're still diffraction limited, so "lens" size still matters.
  • leemailll 9y ago
    is there already a model on sale? Like lytro?
    • regularfry 9y ago
      Lytro doesn't quite work the same way. It doesn't capture the phase of the light, so it's a bit more limited.
    • spuz 9y ago
      No, the technology demonstrated is only capable of imaging 8x8 pixels. Here's a link to the actual research: http://www.caltech.edu/news/ultra-thin-camera-creates-images-without-lenses-78731 http://www.caltech.edu/news/ultra-thin-camera-creates-images...