VOGZALLE

  • Homepage 2
  • LifeStyle
  • Fashion
  • Tech
  • Business
  • Sports
  • Travel
  • Video
  • Politics
  • Science
Breaking News
  • “UFOs exist and from 1 June the whole world will see them”   |   30 Mar 2021

  • Better Than Fiction: The True Story Of Pablo Escobar’s Children   |   03 Mar 2021

  • The battery invented 120 years before its time   |   03 Mar 2021

  • Can physics prove if God exists?   |   02 Mar 2021

  • When will we be able to travel again?   |   01 Mar 2021

  • Beckham talks Messi to Inter Miami rumors   |   01 Mar 2021

 
Home» Business»A New Lens Technology Is Primed to Jump-Start Phone Cameras

A New Lens Technology Is Primed to Jump-Start Phone Cameras

admin 03 Mar 2015 Business Leave a comment 124 Views

The optics in your smartphone have been pretty much the same for more than a decade. That’s about to change.

THE CAMERA ON the first iPhone way back in 2007 was a mere 2 megapixels. And it only had a rear camera; there wasn’t even a front-facing selfie shooter. Today, you’ll find multiple cameras on the front and back of phones—some of them with sensors as large as 108 megapixels, like the biggest camera on Samsung’s Galaxy S21 Ultra.

But while the sensor size and megapixel counts of smartphone cameras have increased considerably in the past decade—not to mention improvements in computational photography software—the lenses that help capture photos remain fundamentally unchanged.

A new company called Metalenz, which emerges from stealth mode today, is looking to disrupt smartphone cameras with a single, flat lens system that utilizes a technology called optical metasurfaces. A camera built around this new lens tech can produce an image of the same if not better quality as traditional lenses, collect more light for brighter photos, and can even enable new forms of sensing in phones, all while taking up less space.

A Flat Lens

How does it work? Well, first it’s important to understand how phone camera lenses work today. The imaging system on the back of your smartphone may have multiple cameras—the latest iPhone 12 Pro has three cameras on the back—but each camera has multiple lenses or lens elements stacked on top of each other. The main camera sensor on the aforementioned iPhone 12 Pro utilizes seven lens elements. A many-lens design like the iPhone’s is superior to a single-lens setup; as light passes through each successive lens, the image gains sharpness and clarity.

“The optics usually in smartphones nowadays consists of between four and seven lens elements,” says Oliver Schindelbeck, innovation manager at the optics manufacturer Zeiss, which is known for its high-quality lenses. “If you have a single lens element, just by physics you will have aberrations like distortion or dispersion in the image.”

More lenses allow manufacturers to compensate for irregularities like chromatic aberration (when colors appear on the fringes of an image) and lens distortion (when straight lines appear curved in a photo). However, stacking multiple lens elements on top of each other requires more vertical space inside the camera module. It’s one of many reasons why the camera “bump” on smartphones has grown larger and larger over the years.

“The more lens elements you want to pack in a camera, the more space it needs,” Schindelbeck says. Other reasons for the size of the bump include larger image sensors and more cameras with zoom lenses, which need extra room.

Get WIRED Access

SUBSCRIBE

Most Popular
  • naked viking in front of straw house
    CULTURE

    Valheim Is Changing How We Play Survival Games

    REECE ROGERS

  • Mars Perserverence
    SCIENCE

    How Far Away From Perseverance Did the Descent Stage Land?

    RHETT ALLAIN

  • This image may contain Toy, Animal, and Fish
    GEAR

    The Best Nintendo Switch Games for Every Kind of Player

    WIRED STAFF

  • wallet
    SECURITY

    Microsoft’s Dream of Decentralized IDs Enters the Real World

    LILY HAY NEWMAN

ADVERTISEMENT

Phone makers like Apple have increased the number of lens elements over time, and while some, like Samsung, are now folding optics to create “periscope” lenses for greater zoom capabilities, companies have generally stuck with the tried-and-true stacked lens element system.

“The optics became more sophisticated, you added more lens elements, you created strong aspheric elements to achieve the necessary reduction in space, but there was no revolution in the past 10 years in this field,” Schindelbeck says.

This is where Metalenz comes in. Instead of using plastic and glass lens elements stacked over an image sensor, Metalenz’s design uses a single lens built on a glass wafer that is between 1×1 to 3×3 millimeter in size. Look very closely under a microscope and you’ll see nanostructures measuring one-thousandth the width of a human hair. Those nanostructures bend light rays in a way that corrects for many of the shortcomings of single-lens camera systems.

The core technology was formed through a decade of research when cofounder and CEO Robert Devlin was working on his PhD at Harvard University with acclaimed physicist and Metalenz cofounder Federico Capasso. The company was spun out of the research group in 2017.

Light passes through these patterned nanostructures, which look like millions of circles with differing diameters at the microscopic level. “Much in the way that a curved lens speeds up and slows down light to bend it, each one of these allows us to do the same thing, so we can bend and shape light just by changing the diameters of these circles,” Devlin says

computer Technology theme wordpress 2015-03-03
Tags computer Technology theme wordpress
Facebook Twitter Stumble linkedin Pinterest More

Authors

Posted by : admin
Next Article :

Donec gravida lectus in ornare cursus.

Related Articles

Top Wall St strategist boosts his 2021 S&P 500 target for a second time

Top Wall St strategist boosts his 2021 S&P 500 target for a second time

admin 01 Mar 2021
Top Wall St strategist boosts his 2021 S&P 500 target for a second time
Modest that whale more swam inscrutably spent

Modest that whale more swam inscrutably spent

admin 27 Apr 2015
 Those an equal point no years do. Depend warmth fat but her but played. Shy ...
Thus far antagonistically and walking the one

Thus far antagonistically and walking the one

admin 26 Apr 2015
Those an equal point no years do. Depend warmth fat but her but played. Shy ...

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Random Posts

Lantern less jay yikes basic inadvertently much
Sports

Lantern less jay yikes basic inadvertently much

admin 26 Apr 2015
Stung near opposite ouch ouch according darn
Fashion

Stung near opposite ouch ouch according darn

admin 26 Apr 2015
Scooped uselessly husky oh llama jeepers wow.
LifeStyle

Scooped uselessly husky oh llama jeepers wow.

admin 27 Apr 2015
Fusce vitae nibh sit amet nulla cursus laoreet.
LifeStyle

Fusce vitae nibh sit amet nulla cursus laoreet.

admin 25 Apr 2015
Lorem ipsum sapien proin maecenas bibendum eros.
LifeStyle

Lorem ipsum sapien proin maecenas bibendum eros.

admin 26 Apr 2015

Advertisement


htmagazine
About VogZalle was created in 2021 , and covers the intersection of Technology, Lifestyle, Business, Entertainment, and Culture.

Follow us

Newslater

Those an equal point no years do. Depend warmth fat but her but played. Shy and subjects wondered

Recent Posts

  • “UFOs exist and from 1 June the whole world will see them”

    “UFOs exist and from 1 June the whole world will see them”

    admin 30 Mar 2021
  • Better Than Fiction: The True Story Of Pablo Escobar’s Children

    Better Than Fiction: The True Story Of Pablo Escobar’s Children

    admin 03 Mar 2021
  • The battery invented 120 years before its time

    The battery invented 120 years before its time

    admin 03 Mar 2021
  • Can physics prove if God exists?
    9.2

    Can physics prove if God exists?

    admin 02 Mar 2021
  • When will we be able to travel again?

    When will we be able to travel again?

    admin 01 Mar 2021

Random Posts

Hilary Duff’s New Fashion Collab Is an Ode to Working Moms

Hilary Duff’s New Fashion Collab Is an Ode to Working Moms

Sane wow more far that rattlesnake until
9.1

Sane wow more far that rattlesnake until

Rebuking undid gasped more wrote as publicly

Rebuking undid gasped more wrote as publicly

Opposite sneered however and far hugged that

Opposite sneered however and far hugged that

Stretched far but well some punctiliously dizzy

Stretched far but well some punctiliously dizzy

Tags

apple Business computer Design Fashion food graphics html5 magazine news newspaper Technology theme wordpress
Copyright 2021, All Rights Reserved
New Magazine Blog News Zalle
Go to mobile version