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A Pocket Camera With Many Eyes - Inside the Development of Light

Accepted submission by AnonTechie at 2016-10-26 13:03:50
/dev/random

The creator [light.co] of the new Light digital camera explains how he made it work:

The best digital cameras today are SLRs (single-lens reflex cameras), which use a movable mirror to guide the same light rays that fall on the sensor into the viewfinder. These cameras normally have precisely ground glass lenses and large, high-quality image sensors. In the right hands, they can shoot amazing pictures, with brilliant colours and pleasing lighting effects, often showing a crisply focused subject and an aesthetically blurred background.

But these cameras are big, heavy, and expensive: A good digital SLR (DSLR) with a decent set of lenses—including a standard 50 mm, a wide angle, and a telephoto, for example—can easily set you back thousands of dollars.

So most photos today aren’t being shot with DSLRs but with the tiny camera modules built into mobile phones. Nobody pretends these pictures match the quality of a photograph taken by a good DSLR; they tend to be grainy, and the camera allows very little artistic control. But smartphone cameras certainly are easy to carry around.

Can’t we have it both ways ? Couldn’t a high-quality yet still-tiny camera somehow be fit into a mobile device ?

The Light camera [light.co] starts with a collection of inexpensive plastic-lens camera modules and mechanically driven mirrors. We put them in a device that runs the standard Android operating system along with some smart algorithms. The result is a camera that can do just about everything a DSLR can—and one thing it can’t: fit in your pocket.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-electronics/gadgets/inside-the-development-of-light-the-tiny-digital-camera-that-outperforms-dslrs [ieee.org]


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