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Comment by hvidgaard | Hacker News Reader

The point is that the information is clearly there, and with current technology it is possible to extract it under ideal circumstances. It's not to say it's feasible or will be, but it's not hard to imagine sensors becoming advanced enough to capture the required light without using a special lens and artificially illuminate the bystanders.

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Wrong, current image sensors have around ~50% quantum efficiency nowadays. [1] That's 1 f-stop from the theoretical maximum, while they're pushing around 10 f-stops above the top-of-the-line mobile phone cam / security cam.

The pace of technology is still limited by physics - if they take out the 2kW monster flash then the lens size needs to be increased to a diameter of several meters, just to maintain the same performance at a distance of 1 meter (!).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_efficiency

You can just absorb more light from a larger area then. We have microscopes that can see individual cells and telescopes that can see distant galaxies. There is nothing impossible zooming in on someone's eye.

You're missing the point. This is not a paper on image acquisition, it is a paper on image processing. Because they began from scratch, they used very favorable image conditions. They are not pushing the idea that their capture format is representative of an application.

We have no idea how hard it would be to recover an image using 50-5% of the light. No one has written that paper. Same for resolution. The paper does not claim to address that question so it seems silly to critique it for not doing so.

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