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Modern smartphone lenses are crazy
- trevortheblack 5y agoYining Karl Li has mentioned in previous posts their intention to write a blog post about modern lens optics, which should outline multiple things. Hopefully, a general overview of the 100s of lenses they've found/made the models for, alongside how modern optics fail to be accurately modeled by the polynomial model of optics...
- dima55 5y agoPolynomial models are generally usable for most applications. If you need lots of accuracy, such as for long-range stereo, they sorta work only for traditional and non-wide lenses.
- bufferoverflow 5y agoThis is from iPhone 7, released 6 years ago. I would like to see an actually modern lens design. Smartphone cameras got so much better in the last 6 years.
- etu 5y agoCorrection: It was released 2016, that's 6 years ago. The point still stands though. But 6 instead of 8 years.
- londons_explore 5y agoI don't think there are any really big changes to the lens design recently... All the effort has gone into multi-camera setups, and different types of lens for macro, wide angle, telephoto, etc. To my understanding, there is still only a single set of moving lenses in an iPhone 13 lens.
- ghaff 5y agoThe iPhone 12 Pro is insanely better than the iPhone X--especially in low light. I have a bunch of fairly high-end camera equipment that I rarely use outside of some fairly specific circumstances at this point
- hughrr 5y agoYeah 13 Pro here. I sold my DSLR last year. I don't need it any more and I hated carrying it around everywhere.
- ghaff 5y agoI have a fairly large FF DSLR Canon system that I rarely use at this point--though not sure if it's worth selling. (I do use it now and then.) I use my Fujifilm mirrorless setup more but even that almost has to be a longer trip where I plan to take a lot of pictures. iPhone is fine for most purposes.
- hughrr 5y agoYeah I do a lot of walking and long trips. I had a mid range DSLR and it was horrible carrying it everywhere and juggling lenses and batteries. The iPhone works 90% of the cases perfectly and the last 10% of the cases, I am happy with the compromise. Edit: The thing that really killed the DSLR for me was lugging the whole kit up Scafell Pike in the pissing rain and cold in the UK. I got some good photos in the morning but carried a brick for the entire day after the battery dumped because of the cold. I had an iPhone XR back then and that kept me going all day fine. When I got back the whole damn camera despite being weather sealed had condensation in it.
- mnw21cam 5y agoThe weather seal may not have been breached. If you put your camera together in a nice warm house, then it would have trapped warm moist air inside it. When you carried it in the cold, the moisture in the air would have condensed. Best advice with batteries is to keep them in your coat pocket, where they stay reasonably warm.
- simonh 5y agoI suspect that's mostly down to sensor design (big pixels, reflective layers behind the sensor so the light goes through twice, etc) and software.
- jbay808 5y ago> reflective layers behind the sensor Reminds me of this surprising little tidbit from E. T. Jaynes' 1991 paper "Theory of Radar Target Discrimination" (https://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/articles/craddis.pdf https://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/articles/craddis.pdf) One might then think naively that we should take equal care to match the receiver to its transmission line so that all the energy captured by the receiving antenna is actually delivered to the receiver. However, this is not the case for a good receiver. [...] Quite generally, in order to deliver the maximum signal/noise ratio at its output, an ideal receiver must reflect all the energy incident up on it. It is only in the limit of an infinitely bad receiver, in which all the output noise is generated internally, that matched input impedance becomes the condition for maximum signal/noise ratio at the output. Actual receivers are somewhere between ideal and infinitely bad, and so they perform best when partially matched, so that a part of the incident energy is reflected and radiated back out the receiver antenna. In fact, an ideal receiver does not run on energy at all, but reflects back all the energy incident on it! [...] This fact surprises many people on first hearing; but we note that it is so general that it remains true in quantum theory, at optical frequencies where hf >> kT and the Nyquist noise formula no longer holds. For initiation of a photo chemical reaction it is not necessary that the light energy be absorbed. For example, it might be thought that the eyes of animals adapted to seeing in the dark would have pupils that act as perfect black bodies, absorbing all the incident light energy. On the contrary, it is a familiar fact that the animals with best night vision have eyes that reflect the incident light strongly, looking like search-lights in the dark.
- amelius 5y agoThey are still rotationally symmetric, at least.
- pvillano 5y agowhat are the applications for non rotationally symmetric lenses?
- jzwinck 5y agoMovies are often shot with anamorphic lenses which are lenses with a sort of vertical cylinder shape. This lets wider aspect ratios be shot using the full frame of a more square aspect film or sensor. https://www.bhphotovideo.com/explora/amp/video/buying-guide/guide-anamorphic-lenses-and-adapters https://www.bhphotovideo.com/explora/amp/video/buying-guide/...
- amelius 5y agoSome people have rotational asymmetry in their eyes, and this is compensated for by eyeglasses with rotational asymmetry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astigmatism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astigmatism
- rredshiftedd 5y agoLIDAR and Laser beam shaping applications.
- amelius 5y agoThe comment of Daniel Darabos points to an interesting resource, explaining how these lenses are designed: https://www.pencilofrays.com/lens-design-forms/#mobile https://www.pencilofrays.com/lens-design-forms/#mobile
- roughly 5y agoBoy, that page is Comprehensive on lens design - that's an awesome resource.
- IshKebab 5y agoInteresting. He doesn't really explain how they're designed though. Must be just automatic global optimisation at this point though. No way a human manually optimised all the ray paths.
- fsh 5y agoUsually some form of gradient descent is combined with a global optimization routine that tries to explore the parameter space. This is nothing new, optics has been designed this way since the early 60s.
- wenc 5y agoAre you sure? Optics equations are nonlinear (and generally nonconvex). Global optimization for nonconvex functions has not existed since the 60s. Even fast function eval (for brute force solutions) has not existed since the 60s.
- LolWolf 5y agoDefinitely not global (probably NP hard) but it’s likely optimized in some basic sense would be my guess. (Probably still using very specific parametrizations of the lenses and such.) At some point we’ll just use metaoptics for lenses that are fully optimized using some general heuristics, but so far I am not sure they (both lenses and heuristics) are ready for prime time :)
- mrfusion 5y agoI don’t really get it. Also could this be used to improve telescopes?
- bagels 5y agoThese designs are required due to the package size constraints and the relatively generous lighting conditions.
- ElephantsMyAnus 5y agoIsn't the primary reason that the picture has to be projected on a flat plane?
- aliher1911 5y agoNot an astronomer, but from my limited knowledge telescopes usually use reflection e.g. mirrors so they don't need to correct for chromatic aberrations introduced by lenses and they also don't use things like optical stabilisation. Refractors could possibly be corrected, but AFAIK they aren't widely used in astronomy and hobby telescopes is such a niche market.
- sega_sai 5y ago(astronomer here). Some comments below partially answered the question, as modern optical/ir telescopes are based on mirror designs (i.e. they have primary, secondary, and sometimes the tertiary mirror like the Vera Rubin telescope). But the lenses are still heavily used in the camera part of the instrument or in spectrographs. And there is a lot of know-how there, as well as optimization in terms of minimising light losses, aberrations etc. I think the constraints and goals are clearly different from the cameras in iphones, but I'd think the techniques must be pretty similar (although Apple clearly has a ton of money that astronomers don't so it's possible that there are some big innovations there, that I don't know about).
- leeoniya 5y agoSCT reflector telescopes use an exotic looking "corrector plate" (lens) to compensate for the easier-to-produce spherical mirrors vs parabolic. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schmidt_corrector_plate https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schmidt_corrector_plate
- teekert 5y agoI recently switched from a OnePlus3 to an iPhone 12 mini and although the pictures are really much better, one thing is worse, the lens glare. There is often a glare and sometimes a bright green dot. Is that a consequence of these many elements? Less spherical and chromatic aberrations but more glare and other internal reflections?
- GoToRO 5y agoFrom what I've learn from 3d software tutorials (trying to simulate a glare), this glare comes from the lenses and each lens will add another ring in the glare? not sure.
- red0point 5y agoMaybe dumb to suggest, but when this happens usually the lens is dirty / a bit greasy, at least from my experience with iPhone cameras.
- teekert 5y agoI’ll degrease the lenses now, perhaps this was quite a brilliant suggestion :)
- eyelidlessness 5y agoNot only is this likely, I intentionally leave my phone camera lenses smudged sometimes because it produces an unpredictable dreamy effect.
- science4sail 5y agoThat's an old Hollywood special effect: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GaussianGirl https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GaussianGirl > When filmed, the Gaussian Girl is shot through a soft-focus filter, a piece of translucent plastic (or very sheer silk, in the days of classic film), or a quick smear of Vaseline, depending on the director's and/or cinematographer's preference. This surrounds her with a softly glowing aura, and smooths out any unappealing pores or lines on her face. The result makes her look nothing short of ethereal.
- GoToRO 5y agoAnd yet you can’t take a picture of the stars or street lights on an iphone…
- mmaunder 5y agoPhysics is still the law. As long as your aperture is small, so is the usable amount of light you’re collecting at the top of that lens funnel.
- GoToRO 5y agoThe problem is that the tiny light from a star or from a street lamp post is multiplied (in software) multiple times to a comic effect...
- mattlondon 5y agoIs this just a software problem? Android has had various night sight modes for several years that make dark views work pretty well?
- GoToRO 5y agoThere is something with the hardware as well, there is some green glare even on easy shots, but the fake lights problem I think is software, the software tries to "pretty" the image and introduces these fake lights.
- TooKool4This 5y agoWell thats definitely not true Stars: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/10/10/amazing-night-sky-photos-iphone-13-pro-max/ https://www.macrumors.com/2021/10/10/amazing-night-sky-photo... Street light: https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/R51UlZi7g1UPq7b9Be05nWfOP_o=/0x0:4032x3024/1720x0/filters:focal(0x0:4032x3024):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22864637/pro_IMG_387230.jpg https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/R51UlZi7g1UPq7b9Be05nWfOP_o=...
- GoToRO 5y ago
- doomlaser 5y agoSony makes the l̶e̶n̶s̶e̶s̶ sensors on modern iPhones and, if rumors are to be believed, also the micro OLED displays on a forthcoming new product category. It's funny. The 1970s Sony Trinitron CRT TVs are what inspired Steve Jobs to make the Apple II case, and here they are working together, at the highest end of technology, many decades later.
- alphabettsy 5y agoI think Sony make the sensors only.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- olliej 5y agoSony only make the sensor, it looks like a bunch of companies manufacture the lenses (sharp, lg infotech, and another company I forgot from my googling 10 seconds ago). But as the linked thread says, apple designed the lens itself (as it has a patent on it, which is apparently common?) I am curious what the Samsung lens system looks like given it has real optical zoom
- Miraste 5y agoSamsung doesn’t have real optical zoom. Their system works by using a separate 1x, 3x, and 10x zoom camera and software interpolation for in-between levels. The 10x zoom camera has the most interesting optics because its lens stack is too long to fit in the phone, so instead it’s a “periscope” camera in which the lenses are sideways and light hits them through a prism, then goes through another prism to hit the sensor. Here’s a diagram of Apple’s (shorter focal length and hitherto unimplemented) version: https://www.dpreview.com/files/p/articles/8346943838/iPhone_patent_2.jpeg https://www.dpreview.com/files/p/articles/8346943838/iPhone_...
- perryizgr8 5y agoThe periscope lens has variable optical zoom, doesn't it?
- turing_complete 5y ago"You think anyone would be doing this kind of utterly insane stuff if it wasn't absolutely necessary?" - Not a software developer. Obviously.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- olliej 5y agoThe problem is an artifact of size constraints and plastic lens having far less variation in optical density, that means a lot more work to correctly direct light to avoid various types of distortion. https://www.pencilofrays.com/lens-design-forms/#mobile https://www.pencilofrays.com/lens-design-forms/#mobile has a much more in depth discussion on the how and why if the lens system design (someone referenced this in a reply to the linked thread)
- baybal2 5y agoPlastic lenses are actually more expensive to make than glass. You need extreme precision, more than with lapped glass lenses. A Taiwanese factory northwest of Dhaka https://www.youngoptics.com/ https://www.youngoptics.com/ makes the lion share of molds for plastic lenses worldwide. YoungOptics used to make them for Sony too. I don't know if it's still the case today.
- CliffStoll 5y agoLong gone are my high-school days of grinding and polishing a 20cm mirror in the cellar, carefully using Foucault knife tests to parabolize it. As an undergrad, using Gaussian formulae when matching lenses in eyepieces. In grad school, writing ray-tracing codes to design multi-element lenses. Then, as a postdoc, using Zernike polynomials to estimate optical errors in the hexagonal mirror segments of the Keck 10 meter telescope. Today's iPhone optics astonish and impress me: A lens built with over a half-dozen aspherical elements. Coordinated imaging with multiple cameras. Wow!
- unfocussed_mike 5y ago> Today's iPhone optics astonish and impress me: A lens built with over a half-dozen aspherical elements. Coordinated imaging with multiple cameras. Wow! Yep. And the same is true of modern "prime" lenses, which appear more like incredibly optimised non-zooming-zooms than the traditional prime recipes we are familiar with from textbooks. A side note: thank you thank you thank you for The Cuckoo's Egg. As a Brit I would ordinarily say that the reason I am a tech guy is the ZX Spectrum or the BBC Micro, but I am not sure my life would be the same in a much bigger way without your book. At 15 or 16 in early 1990 I was sure I wasn't going to university; I was sure I didn't belong there. A friend of my mother's suggested your book to her as something I should read, and I received it as a birthday present. Over time I have come to understand that this recommendation was extraordinarily shrewd. Not just about the tech aspect, or the internet community aspect, or the thrill of the chase aspect, but because it helped me understand that I was exactly the sort of person who should go to university. When I am asked to recommend books it's yours I recommend, twinned with John Naughton's A Brief History Of The Future; they are like companion volumes for a particular kind of way to think and feel about technology. Douglas Hofstadter should be so lucky.
- bagels 5y agoSo are these lens assemblies designed by some optimizer? There are a lot of radical shapes in there.
- R0b0t1 5y agoIt's possible, but they are sufficiently regular I think some obvious hand optimization math could get you there. I've seen similar in other fields.
- daniel_reetz 5y agoYes. Zemax, CodeV, and other optical design software is fundamentally optimization as a design strategy.
- kazinator 5y agoIt looks way less crazy when you "focus" on just the payload areas of the optic pipeline, trimming out the "lunettic fringes". Here is what I mean: https://i.imgur.com/ktbWf0X.png https://i.imgur.com/ktbWf0X.png
- H8crilA 5y agoWhy are the lenses so complex outside of the area that matters? Structural integrity / resistance to dropping?
- fsh 5y agoThe picture in the tweet only shows rays originating from an object that is close to the center of the field of view. The article mentioned in another comment has better schematics: https://www.pencilofrays.com/lens-design-forms/#mobile https://www.pencilofrays.com/lens-design-forms/#mobile Smartphone cameras usually have a pretty wide field of view. The complex shapes are required in order to compensate for the aberrations caused by the large angles between the optical rays and the lens surfaces.
- Noumenon72 5y agoSo the lenses take in incoming white light and split it by color? And there's one sensor for each color or something?
- fsh 5y agoNo, the colors in that schematic are only a visual aid for distinguishing the rays. Each set of colored ray bundles comes from a single object point. The task of the lens is to map them into a single point in the image plane. At the same time, the lens is designed not to split the light by colors, since this would cause chromatic aberrations. This is not shown in this particular schematic.
- dan-robertson 5y agoI think they’re still pretty aspherical, right?
- mrfusion 5y agoPerhaps this technology could be useful for breakthrough starshot: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot
- anfractuosity 5y agoFrom reading some of the comments it sounds like the elements for these lenses are plastic? Is there a downside to using plastic lens elements compared to glass, in terms of image quality? If there isn't a downside, could lenses for SLRs/mirrorless cameras also use such elements? Edit: It sounds like aspheric lens elements might be made from plastic in SLR lenses. But also I found that plastic might not be used for outer lens elements as it scratches easily
- wyager 5y agoPlastic typically has much worse reflection and losses than AR coated glass (at least for narrowband lenses - I'm extrapolating to photo lenses).
- dan-robertson 5y agoI think the main reason to use plastic would be the potentially higher refractive index and better strength properties, which are also why plastic lenses are used in spectacles (some glasses can have higher refractive indexes but still require heavier thicker lenses to avoid the risk of shattering). I would assume that glass lenses would be more likely to shatter if the phone were dropped. But it may really be that the plastic lenses can be manufactured to a higher quality for a reasonable cost.
- baybal2 5y ago
- rredshiftedd 5y agoIn my experience, though I can't speak too much about commercial lenses for DSLR or even SLR camera systems, but can speak to some degree with regards to something like a payloads used for aerospace and defense applications. Designs of aspheres are typically created via Zernike Polynomials. If you have access to an Optical Design program such as Code V, Zemax, OSLO, ASAP, HEXAGON (Raytheon), or Quadoa or equivalent one can spit out something called a SAG Table which takes in account the Zernike Polynomials and allows for much easier time when it comes time to produce either mold or the actual aspheric curved surface that's going to be machined. Yes there is a downside to using plastic, namely chromatic aberration due to lack of index matching. Other issues are limitations on the bandwidth of transmitted light. Furthermore, most "plastics" used for cell phone lenses have historically been glass-like plastics such as PMMA (polymethylmethyl acrylate) or Zeonex. Most of these types of materials however are extremely sensitive in the UV. The plastic lenses also don't do well with wave front correction or even with just shaping light. To make matters worse, coating plastic is usually problematic as it doesn't do well with higher temperature coatings which tend to aid in not only anti-reflective, but also color correction and glare reduction, i.e. PECVD or other types of enhanced plasma coatings. Using glass and by glass I mean a crystalline glass, perhaps something closer to a high grade fused silica or if budget permits sapphire or some type of chalcogenide, one gains better modeling control of the index of refraction (abbe number, glass melt, etc..) and also overall optical sensitivities and STOP (structural, thermal and optical) performance parameters. Something else to consider is the coefficient of thermal expansion between glass and metal can more easily be optimized. But all this comes at a cost. The reason for plastic typically over glass is because of procurement and manufacturing cost. Plastic can have molds machined and have tolerances held rather tightly. Because of this it becomes much easier to pop out lenses. As of late holographic replication and lithographic roll to roll processing has also made making plastic optics a more cost effective option. This is a form of additive manufacturing and actually is probable where things are headed. Manufacturing "glass optics" especially for aspherical optics are dependent upon first ensuring the substrate is pure and that the glass melts are consistent. In most cases glass must be thermal cycled, typically annealed to ensure and maintain rigidity. Rough machining is then performed essentially hogging out the material, in some cases only yielding between 60 to 70% of useable material. Finally and typically either some type of computer controlled polishing, MRF (magneto rheological finishing) or single point diamond lathing of the crystalline glass is performed. The final finishing steps are extremely costly as a combination of advanced metrology (i.e. MTF, interferometry, point-cloud analysis, non-contact surface analysis, various forms of spectroscopy) has to be performed to ensure that said advanced fabrication has either optimized surfaces for wavefront performance by either optimizing or in most cases eliminating mid-spatial frequencies in the form for micron to nanometer level peaks and valleys, all the while not changing or sacrificing the size and other physical dimensions and also preserving the most sensitive clear aperture (i.e. useable and functional area of the lens). It can be quite a time consuming process. TLDR; Glass is better than Plastic, but is more costly to manufacture at scale, unless volume and market acceptance can drive the cost down.
- Buttons840 5y agoHow much does this lens cost?
- agluszak 5y agohttps://nitter.net/yiningkarlli/status/1498069538264399872 https://nitter.net/yiningkarlli/status/1498069538264399872
- tgsovlerkhgsel 5y agoThank you!
- ykl 5y agoHello! Original author (original tweeter?) here. This particular design is from the iPhone 7 (or, more precisely, my guess is that it's from the iPhone 7 due to both the date of the patent [1] and due to the elements matching up with marketing images of the iPhone 7), which is 6 years old now, but I think it's broadly still representative of modern smartphone lenses. In the past 5 years or so, advancements in phone cameras have come mostly in better sensors, far better image processing, and adding more cameras, but the basic principles of the compact ultra-aspherical lens design seem to still be in place. As an example, here [2] is an exploded view of the iPhone 6's lens setup, and here [3] is an exploded view of the more recent iPhone 12's lens setup. The iPhone 12 gained an extra element, but they both use similarly weird ripply elements and you can see the clear lineage between the two phones. Also, as mentioned in the tweet thread and elsewhere in the comments here, Kats Ikeda has an excellent, incredibly detailed and thorough explainer on mobile phone lens design [4]. I don't actually know a whole lot about the optics field; I'm just dabbling as a hobbyist from a computer graphics perspective. Kats Ikeda's site is a much better resource than my Twitter posts for learning about this stuff. [1] https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/7e/4e/3f/4e88d657a1cceb/US20170299845A1.pdf https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/7e/4e/3f/4e88d65... [2] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FMyGm6IVkAY77eY?format=jpg&name=small https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FMyGm6IVkAY77eY?format=jpg&name=... [3] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FMyIbszVQAQhMQ_?format=jpg&name=medium https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FMyIbszVQAQhMQ_?format=jpg&name=... [4] https://www.pencilofrays.com/lens-design-forms/#mobile https://www.pencilofrays.com/lens-design-forms/#mobile
- ketzo 5y agoThank you for the links. How did you originally find yourself falling down this rabbit hole?
- ykl 5y agoI was working on a CG art project [1] where I wanted to render the final image using a real-world lens with lots of "swirly" bokeh [2], but the renderer I was using didn't have the ability to simulate real-world lenses. So, to finish the project, I had to write my own plugin to achieve this effect. Afterwards, I found the topic interesting, so I started going further down the rabbit hole! [1] https://pixar-community-production.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Art_Challenges/iconoclasts/finalists/ykl-Render-Wrangler.jpg https://pixar-community-production.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.co... [2] https://petapixel.com/2020/10/22/this-cheap-projector-lens-creates-the-most-intense-swirly-bokeh/ https://petapixel.com/2020/10/22/this-cheap-projector-lens-c...
- post_break 5y agoMy S21 with "scumbag zoom" or creeper zoom. The amount of zoom, in something as thin as it is, is mind blowing. To zoom 10x, and be able to take great pictures, hand held with almost no shake. Then you have the top GoPros shooting 5k with gimbal like stabilization. Cameras are getting crazy.
- aqfamnzc 5y agoIf I remember right, newer Samsungs have their stack of telephoto optics pointing toward the top of the phone, parallel to the display. Then use a periscope style prism to look out and forward. That way you aren't limited by the device thickness (although I guess now the diameter of the lenses is constrained)
- unfocussed_mike 5y agoYeah -- this is typically called "folded optics". There have been experiments with this over the years. Minolta coined the phrase for a 3x zoom in the DiMAGE X series, starting twenty years ago, and as I recall they were the first to use this technology in a consumer camera: https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/minoltadimagex https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/minoltadimagex
- TedShiller 5y agoThey’re crazy, and still no match for DSLRs
- astrange 5y agoDSLRs are no match for a Fujifilm GFX100 or a Phase One or the Hubble Space Telescope but none of those users seem to like comparing them as much.
- TedShiller 5y agoI don’t think you can carry a Hubble telescope with you
- cycomanic 5y agoActually, I'm much more amazed by what lens designs for cameras look like. Sure I can appreciate how they fit these designs in a tiny amount of space, but they are also not constrained in shape by the same constrains as glass lenses. Even more amazing is how they designed very complex lenses in the 50's and 60's essentially by hand. And those designs have stood the test of time and have barely changed. Compared to what modern lens designers have available to them, I just find it mindblowing how the designers then could come up with these things.
- sandworm101 5y agoComplicated, but simply an incremental evolution of a very old solution. These complicated lens arrangements to counteract chromatic aberration got started in the 18th century. The game is all about getting three distinct wavelengths to focus despite each reacting differently at each lens. The lens in the iPhone looks complex but it isn't any more complicated than others. The most complex I've ever read about was for a satellite which had to maintain focus despite temperature changes. Iirc that employed a stack of over a dozen lenses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achromatic_lens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achromatic_lens https://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/61074908 https://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/61074908 https://photography.tutsplus.com/tutorials/here-is-what-to-look-for-when-you-buy-photography-lenses--cms-27047 https://photography.tutsplus.com/tutorials/here-is-what-to-l... https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/journals/journal-of-applied-remote-sensing/volume-13/issue-03/032502/APIS--the-miniaturized-Earth-observation-camera-on-board-OPTOS/10.1117/1.JRS.13.032502.full?SSO=1 https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/journals/journal-of-appli...
- gmueckl 5y agoThe craziness in the iPhone design isn't exactly the number of elements, but their weird aspherical shapes. The traditional approaches for designing optics are have been developed for spherical lenses because they are much simpler to describe mathematically. Even then, optimizing them requires a lot of numerical computation. At first glance, optimizing these wavy, complex lens shapes seems to require much more involved methods.
- thenthenthen 5y agoIf you listen close, you can hear them (stabilising?) constantly! (iPhone 6)
- lisper 5y agoWhat I have been wondering for years is why this technology hasn't found its way back into regular cameras. AFAICT, regular cameras with vastly bigger apertures, which should be able to take better photos, in fact are generally much worse until you get into huge bulky DSLRs. Why?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- lotsofpulp 5y agoI assume the market is extremely bimodal. Either you are satisfied with a phone camera, or you want to go all out and have all the benefits of a DSLR. There are very, very few people who want a stand-alone camera that offers less than a DSLR.
- Closi 5y agoIt’s worth saying that there are great quality prosumer compact cameras, but the price point is much higher for this (>$600) than the old school cheap $100 point and shoot used to be. It’s the bottom end of the market that’s been completely made obsolete, and as the quality gap shrinks there are also less people that want to carry / spend money on two devices.
- kube-system 5y agoPoint-and-shoot cameras are a dying segment. The target market for this segment is taking casual photos of friends and family. These buyers prioritize convenience and price over performance. Smartphones meet these requirements as good or better than their dedicated counterparts.
- jbay808 5y ago> AFAICT, regular cameras with vastly bigger apertures, which should be able to take better photos, in fact are generally much worse until you get into huge bulky DSLRs. Why? Are you sure about this? The last point-and-shoot camera I owned I bought around 2010, and other than zoom, my smartphone gives much better results. But then I met someone with a new hobby-level Panasonic point-and-shoot camera and I was flabbergasted at the quality of the photos she gets out of it. I tried taking some pictures with it and compared to my smartphone they all looked they belonged in a magazine. Smartphones have a ton of processing power and sensor quality packed into a small package, but I think it's still hard to outperform a half-decent lens and good quality sensor that are much, much larger, and it seems like point-and-shoot cameras have gotten really good.
- rapjr9 5y agoWhat ever happened to holographic lenses? I thought they were supposed to revolutionize lens design. Create a complex lens, take a hologram of it, and you can cheaply print infinite copies of it. I understand there was some light loss, is that why they never took over lens manufacture?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- 1-6 5y ago“You might have seen the lensmaker’s equation early as high school, and this is the essence of the performance of the lens.” We’re either doing high school wrong or this person has seen their fair share of top schools in their lifetime.
- sheikheddy 5y agoI saw it in A level physics, and it was part of the standard curriculum, so not that rare.
- isaacimagine 5y agoI think the lensmaker's equation is pretty par for the course for most advanced physics classes in high school, no?
- stingraycharles 5y agoOver here in The Netherlands it was also definitely part of our physics course, I believe taught around the age of 14 or 15.
- blululu 5y agoInteresting. This is on the young side internationally. FWIW the Dutch have also been global leaders in optics for most history (the field really only starts when the Dutch invented the telescope and the microscope).
- fomine3 5y agoAdd a point: in Japan (also where lens manufacturers HQ'd), it's taught in high school and only for who chose physics, but some basics are told in junior high school for everyone.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- chronogram 5y ago
- oblio 5y agoIs there something like this for Samsung?
- contingencies 5y agoThis weekend by chance I met the lead engineer for the factory producing these. I showed him this article. He humbly requested to extend his own thanks to all engineers working in the industry. Genuine yoda.
- globular-toast 5y agoI've always been fascinated by Fresnel lenses[0]. Is this a similar concept of squeezing a much bigger lens down into a smaller space, or is it achieving something that would not be possible with a single lens? It would be really cool to seen an animation of this showing a sweep of the approach angle from one side of the sensor to the other. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresnel_lens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresnel_lens
- culi 5y agoThe browser scores given for Interop2022 (Chrome: 71%, Firefox: 74%, and Safari: 73%) are heavily weighed down because of the "Investigation" part of the score which of course they all score 0 on because it's just begun. Without that, their scores on the mentioned focus areas would look more like: - Chrome: 79% - Firefox: 82% - Safari: 81% I feel like this gives a better insight into the current state of things