Comment by gruturo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gruturo | Hacker News Reader

Partially off topic:

What happened to the "non-flat" CCD / CMOS sensors which were going to enable awesome smartphone cameras, by allowing lens assemblies with far fewer elements and virtually no chromatic aberration? Thanks to the fewer elements whey could be way thinner (or much wider in the same thickness, collecting way more light) and still fit in a smartphone body. This was supposed to especially benefit smartphones due to their fixed lenses (while for a variable zoom lens you would need different sensor curvature depending on the zoom level which is trickier....).

A couple relevant links (just a few search results):

https://optics.org/news/12/5/4

https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/news/sonys-new-curved-ima...

https://www.dpreview.com/news/7542036825/french-startup-is-p...

Also, the quickly deformable (with an electric field) "liquid" lenses which would revolutionize the lens aspect, similarly appearing in a lot of news and then never seemingly materialize.

https://opg.optica.org/oe/fulltext.cfm?uri=oe-31-26-43416&id...

https://www.nextpit.com/liquid-lens-technology-smartphones

As someone with mild knowledge of semiconductor fabrication and optics, I honestly think these technology are not that meaningful to justify their cost of development and implementation, compared to the winning solution of arbitrarily complex plastic lens assemblies.

Chromatic aberration can be good enough with doublet lens design and Petzval is largely solved by the final field flattener usually with multiple concave and convex sections, and you can still easily fit a large number of lenses in a small formfactor.

Additionally being able to adjust the power of a lens is not a huge gamechanger, as a lot of the complexity with modern optic design is to counter various defects and distortion like aforementioned Petzval.

Rather, the fundamental limit is the sensor size. It's just not practical to achieve much better image quality with a physically small system

Thanks for the information! But my understanding was exactly in the direction of the issue you point out - the fundamental limit being the sensor size.

A curved sensor would, by allowing a relatively thinner (due to fewer elements) lens assembly, could have a larger area, and still remain within the allowed overall "thickness budget" of the smartphone. Hence my surprise that they seem to have gone nowhere.

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