"Lensless" Photography

[Mark D Segal]

Could it be that a forthcoming generation of cameras will have optics outperforming anything we now have with a sliver of the size and weight we now carry around?

Flat Lens Revolution - BBC News

[John Nollendorfs]

Mark:
This could be a real revolution! Especially for phone cameras! The lenses could be made on a wafer fab line, with great precision, for all kinds of specialized purposes.

Be interesting if Nikon, Canon, Zeiss, Sony jump on it? While the first application seems to be in micro-photography, will it work in a larger environment such as our digital cameras?

[Mark D Segal]

Hi John - that's the question that came to my mind too; they didn't address it specifically in that news report, but in principle once the technology is in place, at some time and with some further work one should probably expect it to be portable.

[Zorki5]

Be interesting if Nikon, Canon, Zeiss, Sony jump on it? While the first application seems to be in micro-photography, will it work in a larger environment such as our digital cameras?

Nikon, Zeiss, Leica, and Olympus are well-known and respected producers of microscopes, esp. optics for them, so I'd fully expect them to try that venue first.

BTW, in the linked BBC article, that size comparison of microscope objective with a flat lens is not quite fair. Microscope objective is almost always a hollow metal empty tube with actual optics occupying only tiny space at its very tip.

[Zorki5]

Oh, and thanks for the link, Mark!

Was always wondering when something like that was going to happen. It can even be said it's long overdue, in a way...