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Nikon reveals a lens that captures wide and telephoto images simultaneously
- tyho 2y agoI’m imaging a variable focal length across the image plane, decreasing as the distance to the centre increases.
- RicoElectrico 2y agoI imagine two optical paths that coincide at the output. But who knows, no details are provided, so it's only speculation.
- CodeCompost 2y agoLet me guess, it's going to be "AI assisted"
- bilinguliar 2y agoThey started the development in 2020, so it may still be a blockchain.
- jeffreygoesto 2y agoIt must be a lens that smoothly varies focal length depending on the distance from the center. You want pedestrians and bikes on the vicinity, as wide angle as possible and cars far away for emergency braking and ACC in the center of the image when going straight on a highway.
- ratmeadow 2y agoThis is fascinating, I didn't think that was possible. What would be the optimal sensor geometry for such a lens? The distortion would be crazy, wouldn't it? Nowhere near a rectilinear projection.
- zokier 2y agoI don't know if it needs to be smoothly varying instead of having just two zones with a step between them. Either way, I'd expect it to need significant amount of processing to get anything useful.
- mikewarot 2y agoI'm guessing it's a beam splitting prism with 2 paths, one for wide angle, and the other for telephoto. They used to make cameras with 3 ccds for color video.
- ruined 2y agothe press release specifies there's no offset/parallax which would rule this out
- IshKebab 2y agoNo it wouldn't?
- ruined 2y agoyou're correct, i misread the parent post
- tobyhinloopen 2y agono because the light enters the same lens
- londons_explore 2y agoI'm guessing it's a regular camera lens, surrounded by a wide angle lens which is donut-shaped. Both images end up superimposed on the sensor, and there is probably a lot of distortion too, but for AI that might not be an issue.
- 0_____0 2y agoNeedlessly complex, and machine vision camera users don't like the ambiguity that comes with ML processing on the frontend of their own stuff.
- rurban 2y agoAnd I would have no idea how to calibrate it. If it produces an EXR with clearly seperate images with different lenses, fine. Like a 3D EXR with left and right.
- Anotheroneagain 2y agoThis has no future with 200mpx sensors becoming common.
- ruined 2y ago200mpx sensors have an incredible future with this becoming available
- tobyhinloopen 2y agoYou'd need some incredible amount of processing power to process all that data, and it also assumes the lens is even "sharp enough" to capture that resolution. Even high-end full frame lenses + sensors with a fixed focal length struggle to reach 200MP of detail. (60MP Sony A7RV with pixel shift can take pictures with 240MP). No way this weird monstrosity can get anywhere near 200MP in a moving vehicle.
- fredwu 2y agoCropping isn't the same as capturing at a different focal length.
- wvbdmp 2y agoIsn’t it optically? Ignoring lens imperfections and assuming infinite resolution, you should get the same image cropping vs. equivalent focal length, no?
- tobyhinloopen 2y agoI think it does, yes. Cropping 25% of the center of a 35mm F/2.0, you'd get the equivalent of a 70mm F/4.0, but with only 25% of the pixels obviously.
- GiovanniP 2y agoI expect depth of focus to be different.
- Torkel 2y agoSo it's a fisheye lens? If you plot pixels per degree over the field of view of a fisheye lens you will see that vastly more pixels are dedicated to the center "eye". And also the field of view is large. Which is what this novel lens claims to also do.
- Onavo 2y agoThe fisheye transform is destructive though. Reversing it is a probabilistic process (not really a big problem now with generative ML but still)
- nuccy 2y agoNo it is not destructive, math-wise the transformation is bidirectional and can be used many times without any detail losses. The problem is sampling by the image sensor, some pixels endup with larger fiel-of-view than others, so reconstructed flat image of fractions of the fisheye would have different sharpness over the frame.
- Onavo 2y agoSo it is destructive in a practical sense. You still need a generative process to fix the "sharpness problems" otherwise you will get a blurred halo after you deconvolve it.
- hengheng 2y agoI wouldn't want generative ML to infest my car's safety features tbh. Fortunately you are wrong.
- vouaobrasil 2y agoNo, a fisheye is still just a very wide lens with a single focal length. This lens claims to have two focal lengths.
- michaelt 2y agoIt might be like that - but there are other options as well. There are companies that make stereo lenses, capturing two images side-by-side on a single sensor, for people who want to take 3D photos on their interchangeable-lens cameras. And there are "anamorphic" lenses that squeeze things horizontally but not vertically - in digital terms, producing non-square pixels. Very popular in films in the 70s and 80s. And when it comes to corrective glasses, bifocal and varifocal/progressive lenses are another common type of lens providing variable optical properties. Self-driving cars need to deal with both "stopped at a crosswalk, are there pedestrians?" (which needs a wide view) and "driving at 70mph, stopping distance about 300 feet, what's that thing 300 feet away?" (which needs a zoomed in view) If you look at https://www.pexels.com/photo/city-street-in-fisheye-16209078/ https://www.pexels.com/photo/city-street-in-fisheye-16209078... for example - it's wide (which is good) but the details at 300 feet ahead aren't winning any prizes. Far more pixels are wasted on useless sky than are used on the road ahead.
- usrusr 2y agoOn an only slightly related note, I'd be happy if the same was available on smartphones, in software: my mobile photography is of the school "take a lot and discard almost as many" and having to choose between the different lens/sensor pairs ahead of snap is entirely alien to that process. So the camera software is forever set to that main lense and all the other ones are just dead weight in my pocket (and stuff manufacturers don't allow me to not buy when I need a new phone, preferably one with a good main camera) I think I understand that the precessor would not be able to read out the sensors at the same time, but time-multiplexed bracketing has been done before, it really should not be too hard or weird to apply that concept to multiple sensors? (some sensors with integrated memory might even be able to do concurrent capture/deferred readout?)
- disillusioned 2y agoThis feels like the kind of thing that's so obvious it's hard to believe it isn't being pursued... Google could, for example, make a _huge_ splash with the Pixel 10 by presenting this with the option of after-the-fact optical zoom or wide angle shots, or using the multiple lenses for some fancy fusing for additional detail. And to your point, DSLRs have been doing deferred readout in the sense of storing to an on-device cache before writing out to the SD card while waiting for previous frames to complete their write ops... this same sort of concept should be able to apply here. I don't know much more about the computational photography pipeline, but I imagine there might be some tricky bits around focusing across multiple lenses simultaneously, around managing the slight off-axis offset (though that feels more trivial nowadays), and, as you say, around reading from the sensors into memory, but then also how to practically merge or not-merge the various shots. Google already does this with stacked photos that include, say, a computationally blurred/portrait shot alongside the primary sensor capture before that processing was done, so the bones are there for something similar... but to really take advantage of it would likely require some more work. But this is all by way of saying, this would be really really cool and would open up a lot of potential opportunities.
- forkerenok 2y ago> Google could, for example, make a _huge_ splash with the Pixel 10 by presenting this with the option of after-the-fact optical zoom... Pardon my ignorance, but isn't this just an inferior version of after-the-fact photo capture? On a serious note, what do you really mean by this? I have trouble imagining how that would work.
- deskr 2y agoA picture is worth a thousand words. Yet, in an article about a camera lens, there isn't a single picture from it.
- bayindirh 2y agoMaybe because that's the most exciting and revealing part of the tech? Or maybe the output is boring. i.e. two different output streams with acceptably sharp image with well controlled distortion.
- surfingdino 2y agoThere're only 312 words in that article. Clearly not worth even one picture.
- interludead 2y agoIt’s nice to see innovation in optics yet I think it's more for niche scenarios like sports
- arghwhat 2y agonit: All wide lenses also capture a "telephoto" image in the center. The only thing a telephoto lens does is to spread that image out over the whole sensor. Maybe their lens is variable focal length, providing more magnification in the center at a presumed cost of clarity.
- mannykannot 2y agoI wonder whether that is entirely so (though the difference may not be relevant for the intended applications of this lens.) The reason I say this is that one can often tell whether a telephoto lens is being used at long range, as opposed to a normal lens at shorter distance, by the way the former seems to compress the longitudinal axis (at least when one is watching a movie rather than a still image.) This effect seems to me to be independent of focal depth, in that it does not seem to depend on having nearby or distant objects markedly out-of-focus, though I may be mistaken about this. Do magnified long-distance movies shot with normal focal-length lenses look like their telephoto equivalents?
- colanderman 2y agoYes, mathematically telephoto is exactly just cropped wide angle. The same light field is falling on the front element of either lens so, modulo focus effects and distortion, it could not be otherwise. (Differing projections/distortions such as fisheye are likewise exactly equivalent to mathematical transforms for the same reason.) You can see that this is true when using a (physical) zoom lens. When zooming, there is no change in the projected image of any sort other than it simply grows larger. The effect you are referring to is complementary to parallax and is likewise due exactly to physical proximity to or distance from the subject being photographed. (Telephoto lenses require the subject to be further away to remain in the frame; in doing so, they move relatively closer to the background, thus longitudinally compressing the scene.)
- tonyarkles 2y agoThis is definitely a real effect. I can’t doodle this out right now but if you grab a piece of paper and draw out the triangles for a pinhole camera with different focal lengths you can see how the angles (and horizontal separation at the image plane) are quite different with different focal lengths.
- SomeHacker44 2y agoI am guessing it is some sort of anamorphic lens that has the center portion telephoto and then smears out the wide angle around the edges of the sensor. So you need a translation algorithm to get back to a normal image.
- diggernet 2y agoI imagine it taking pictures like this: https://www.escherinhetpaleis.nl/escher-today/balcony/?lang=en https://www.escherinhetpaleis.nl/escher-today/balcony/?lang=...
- neallindsay 2y agoLike many here, my first thought was "telephoto is just a crop of a wide-angle, so what are they bragging about?" Here's my speculation: Most lenses are "distortion corrected" because they assume they will be displayed on a flat surface. A little explanation for those not familiar: When you take a picture of a brick wall with your camera parallel to the wall, notice that the bricks on the edge of the photo are the same size as the ones in the center, even though the edge bricks are further away from the camera. This means more pixels are allocated per degree of view near the edge of the field-of-view than at the center. An "uncorrected" lens is basically what we would call a "fish-eye" lens. Here (ideally) the same number of pixels are in a one-degree circle in the center of the field-of-view as are in a one-degree circle near the edge. I don't think they would crow about just using an "uncorrected" lens either, so I'm going to guess that this is a "reverse-corrected" lens system where a one-degree circle in the center gets more pixels than it would at the edge. This would be the obvious approach if they want a good center crop but want to capture all the periphery as well.
- 0_____0 2y agoThis sounds pretty elegant but I don't think it's correct. I don't have a good sense for what the R&D required to spin up a new bespoke sensor is, but I think it's sort of high - I assume there's a reason Nikon seem to source most of their sensors from Sony. Assuming you get to use a custom sensor for your camera, you also lose a bit of sensitivity at the "fovea." Also, Nikon's own press release also refer specifically to an "optical lens system with both telephoto and wide-angle lens functions," which leads me to believe this isn't an innovation at the sensor level.
- gavinsyancey 2y agoI don't think the parent comment is saying this is a new sensor; rather that the lens spreads the center over a wider area of the sensor (hence more pixels) and squeezes the edges into a smaller area (hence less pixels).
- neallindsay 2y agoI was talking about the lens achieving the difference in image distribution across the sensor, not a sensor with non-uniform pixels.
- DarkSucker 2y agoNeither the article nor official link gave much optical design detail. Here's my guess. A (substantially) radially symmetric system comprising a wide-angle positive-short-focal-length first lens followed closely by a negative-short-focal-length whose diameter is small (thus covering a small range of angles, in the center field of view, from the first lens). A single central sensor behind the negative element is for telephoto images, while a collection of sensors distributed radially around the first lens and off axis capture wide angle images. Imagine a low-index ball lens in contact with a thin high-index negative lens. That's the idea. I'm sure the real design uses multiple surfaces/elements for each lens, and I'm sure it's hyper-optimized. I'm interested to learn how close my guess is to reality. Apologies for the complex wording to describe geometry.
- dewbrite 2y agoNot sure what the policies are on banning sites, but can this website please be banned? I'm on mobile, this website has deceptive hitboxes so "dismiss" on the notifications prompt will almost hit the advert on the bottom. Once I finally managed to read the article and hit the bottom of the page, it had a popup which hijacked navigation so I couldn't easily return to HN. Will record this behavior if asked. That said... There's not much to say about this? Is it using "meta" lenses printed on silicon? Wish the article would have had any information whatsoever. I suppose we'll learn more at CES. :P
- idiot-savant 2y agoCouldn’t find the article inside this ad collection.
- bru3s 2y ago[flagged]
- Neywiny 2y agoDespite a number of what look like copy paste articles, I see no actual pictures of what the pictures taken look like. Maybe we'll see at CES but until then these feel like clickbait.
- kmlx 2y agoofficial link: https://www.nikon.com/company/news/2024/1219_01.html https://www.nikon.com/company/news/2024/1219_01.html still no photos, but they say more info will come during CES
- londons_explore 2y agoI assume there are no photos because the actual images on the sensor will look like gibberish - it'll effectively be two different images overlaid, and look a total mess. However, feed that mess into AI, and it might successfully be able to use it to see both wide and far.
- idlerig 2y agoIf CAT scan imagery exists, I suppose this sort of image processing shouldn't be impossible to do-- though I readily admit I have no idea what the logic behind it might look like without some sort of wavelength-based filtering that would make a photographer shudder.
- ska 2y agoTomographic reconstruction is in principal pretty straightforward (Radon transform). MRI is much (much), fwiw, though RF not optics. I don't think wavelength filtering will help you here, as you don't control the input at all. Some sort of splitter in the optical chain might, but you'd be halving your imaging photons with all that entails. Or you can have e.g. a telephoto center and a wide fringe. It's an interesting idea.
- kylebenzle 2y agoYou are right.