> What those devices do with that light, however, is changing at an incredible rate. This will produce features that sound ridiculous, or pseudoscience babble on stage, or drained batteries. That’s okay, too. Just as we have experimented with other parts of the camera for the last century and brought them to varying levels of perfection, we have moved onto a new, non-physical “part” which nonetheless has a very important effect on the quality and even possibility of the images we take.

I'm confused. What do “those” devices do or could do except capturing an erzatz, a frozen view of world? What is this new non-physical “part”? Cameras captures photons (from one [1] to many) and display a composite image, post-processing or no.

[1] Photon-efficient imaging with a single-photon camera: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms12046