Sony Creates Curved CMOS Sensors That Mimic the Eye

[rjlittlefield]

This could be very interesting!

http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/semi ... ic-the-eye

One of the big problems in lens design is to make them be flat-field on both sides, image and object at the same time. If Sony can make production quantities of these things, with lenses to match, we could see some big improvements in just a few years.

--Rik

[Lothar-Gutjahr]

Hi Rik,

thanks for posting this interesting news.
My comment towards that is :

Interesting yes!
But a horribel step forward to the past and a nightmare; or lets put it this way:

We find back to the silicon sand in Africa "The age of all-silicon and wireless technology" You start digging around the pyramids and wouldnt find a single peace of wire.

I really was impressed by that old ideas about wireless times and this reminded me imedialy at that old knee-slapper joke.

Other aspect: a interesting move toward worldmonopol for camera lenses. O.K. one doesnt have to buy such a camera while prefering to play with LUMINAREs.
Sorry my brain isnt good anough to express this thoughts as i want. So look at this statement as an experimental try.

Greetings

Lothar

[Olympusman]

The idea is nothing new. Kodak and other manufacturers curved the film planes in single-use cameras (SUC) a term that Kodak didn't care for and called them One-Time Use Cameras (OTUC). Curving the film plane with a cheap plastic two-element lens actually produced pretty good image qaulity up to 8X10 inches. I have an old Tower (Sears) 6X7 cm camera from the 1930's with a safety pin shutter that produced surprising image quality.
Many panoramic cameras such as the Widelux also curved the film plane and the Army KA-60 70mm panoramic aerial camera did as well.

[DQE]

Rik,

Thanks for posting this interesting link. If they have really improved the SNR 1.4 to 2X, and not just the sensitivity, that would be a nice improvement. Of course it must not bring along other issues!

I also happened to see another interesting link on this page:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/robot ... iny-drones

I wonder if there are really significant advantages for such a system vs an off-the-shelf conventional camera? For sure, dragonflies and robber flies seem to do fine with such a system.