Despite a number of what look like copy paste articles, I see no actual pictures of what the pictures taken look like. Maybe we'll see at CES but until then these feel like clickbait.
still no photos, but they say more info will come during CES
However, feed that mess into AI, and it might successfully be able to use it to see both wide and far.
I don't think wavelength filtering will help you here, as you don't control the input at all. Some sort of splitter in the optical chain might, but you'd be halving your imaging photons with all that entails. Or you can have e.g. a telephoto center and a wide fringe. It's an interesting idea.
The processed result would be quite uninteresting to look at: it's a wide-angle photo where the outer portion is much more blurry than the center. Considering the current intended application, the picture probably would probably be pretty mediocre.
This is very specific technology that solves very specific problems (and might one day make its way to smartphones), but not something I'd expect to produce glamor shots right now.
As a photographer who worked at a newspaper in college for a few years, I just think including an image makes sense in an article about a novel lens.
CES should be interesting, this year.
This would be like someone announcing a new RAM innovation -- and people asking what its Cinebench or Geekbench score is.
EDIT: I got pulled into the discussion without reading the article. The lens is for industrial uses.
Without knowing more about the optics, it’s hard to know how much of a role the sensor/ISP play in the innovation, but those are well established and widely capable across both photographic and industrial use cases.
Very curious to eventually learn more about this and whether it might eventually find its way into traditional cameras.
Nikon is an optics company that's also made cameras for a long time, and then very nearly didn't; before the Z mirrorless line took off, the company's future as a camera manufacturer was seriously in doubt. But even a Nikon that had stopped making cameras entirely after the D780 would still be an optics company. There is no serious reason to assume the necessity of some sensor/ISP "special sauce" behind the novel optics announced here to make the system work. And considering where Nikon's sensors actually come from, if there were more than novel optics involved here, I'd expect to see Sony also mentioned in the partnership.
Of course that's not to say photographic art can't be made with commercial or industrial equipment; film hipsters notwithstanding, pictorialism in the digital era has never been more lively. But I would expect this to fall much in that same genre of "check out this wild shit I did with a junkyard/eBay/security system installer buddy find", rather than anything you'd expect to see on the other end of a lens barrel from a Z-mount flange.
If it's for eyeballs it would be nifty to know what kind of image displays both kinds of information at once.
If it's for computers, what is the advantage over two cameras right next to each other? Less hardware? More accurate image recognition? Something else?