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Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

Sure the tiny sensors of gadgets have come a long way, but looking at it from the other perspective: what are the trends in enthusiast "big" cameras? Basically it's sensor growing. This is of course mainly driven by shrinking costs of manufacturing sensors, but there is still a huge cost in terms of bulk and weight to carry a camera with a 35mm sensor. Yet this is still something people want to do.

Sadly photography is still very much a physics game, and while there is some room for improvement in sensor tech, and cheating e.g with multiple exposures, even a ten-fold increase in dynamic range and sensitivity wouldn't make large sensors obsolete.

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I wonder how long it will be until a smartphone manufacturer introduces multiple sensors connected by an interferometer. If you take one of the 6-inchish smartphones on the market, that would give you a massive virtual aperture size, allowing fantastic resolution.

Does that really work when the subject distance isn't much greater than the sensor array length (unlike in astronomy)?

Wouldn't it take a lot to merge the images when they are completely different, like a stereo image?

Well yes, but this is more about improving performance precisely fr that use case - zoom is the one thing that really lacks in a modern smartphone camera. If you can now resolve detail at a much greater distance, then you effectively have your zoom.

That's more a crop that gives you more "reach" than a true telephoto though. Of course most people just want more reach and don't really care for perspective when they say "zoom", so sensor array could definitely work for that. Also since a phone is just the right size to record stereo for vr as well, which is also bound to be the next big thing. Two sensors isn't far fetched given several applications for them, and low cost

Surely its more about the fact that lenses have to be a certain size.

Lenses have to be a certain size of the sensors and apertures are a certain size. And those sizes are fixed, for a given image (with a specific depth of field etc). So physics (the optics) is a thing. A breakthrough in optics that removed the need for heavy glass to bend light would be a revolution.

This. to quote my father (who is actually a professional photographer): Pissy lens; pissy photo.

You need chunks of glass at the moment regardless of sensor size. I carry a basic DSLR around with me (D3100) and a decent but cheap lens (AF-S DX 18-55) and a shit smartphone. They cost less than a good smartphone and the results are amazing.

I was under the impression that there are basically not enough photons at the sizes that most smart phones sensors are. Once you get to low light levels a tiny sensor just can't be fed enough photons to give a good picture.

That's basically it but the amount of light reaching that sensor is improved by a somewhat larger lens than you usually get on a smartphone.

Sure. The more glass you have the more photons you can gather. I have a f1.2 50mm lense and the amount of photons it can pull in is amazing. There is no way any phone is going to be able to replicate this.

For a given exposure duration.

Unfortunately, things move.

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