Not right now. Sounds like they are working on lenses that could one day work with colored light for cameras. Maybe after that, they could be used for specials?
The Lidar and infrared and AI will help with the low light. They fill in colors instead of take the result of the lens and sensor physical limitations.
There are apps that do what the default cameras don’t do yet, and we’ll continue to see rapid optimizations on this front.
what you mentioned is not outside of the realm of what can be done. If there is a need, making an app that does it will give you a brief advantage.
I guess you could have cameras that pick up the extra colours linked to something like a Microsoft hololens and displayed somehow like a shimmer for UV say.
Not to mention changing materials would likely have continuous costs, and will impact the materials properties and longevity - potentially in ways that just don't add up to a feasible product.
And then there's the fact that this is a hugely international business, so unless we convince the whole world to do this, we'll be impacting supply lines and flexibility there too.
The whole undertaking seems like it would have an absurd scope - just to avoid adding IR filters that cameras need anyhow to achieve accurate color reproduction, and therefore most cameras already include!
Either that or the consumer-grade digital cameras will start to evolve in new directions. I think we're already seeing the beginnings of this with Lytro's light-field camera, for example. I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing light-field cameras from the major manufacturers (Canon, Nikon, et al) in a few years time. And given the physical constraints of the microlens array, it'll before you get one of those in a mobile phone!
I think the camera industry has yet to realize the amount of processing power that's available in modern chips.
Once they do, the very concept of lenses as we know them is likely going to evolve drastically: at the end of the day, the signal captured by the physical CCD needs not in any way to look like the finished product (the final photo).
They've realized that for color already (CCD captures a signal that's heavily processed for color before final delivery, eg debayering + color correction).
Wait till they realize they can pull off the same trick with geometry, the entire discussion in this thread will become moot in a heartbeat.
Are there cameras capable of taking pictures in a broader spectrum of colours available for less than a small fortune? I'd like to see photos taken infrared - ultraviolet 'compressed' into our red-blue range.
That sounds very interesting. I feel like firmware/hardware automation combo that swaps RGB filters and takes exposures in accord could provide interesting workflows for owners of those monochrome digital cameras.
Their technology trademark is 'Dynamic Digitized Lightfield Signal'. A lightfield camera has multiple lenses to record multiple focal points simultaneously. Have they found a way to reverse this concept, 'project' to a wearable an eye refocusable image? Their list of job openings leads to a lot of possibilities.
Yeah, it's getting closer. With fast enough sensor they could probably do HDR+ on video too, like HDRx on RED cameras. If they had a 10bit HEVC video profile for recording, they could store more of that extended DR too.
Some things will be out of reach with a single small lens phone - depth of field on video, and selection of focal lengths/fov. And small sensors always have worse noise performance (quantum efficiency)
These devices will have very poor image quality. It's not like making small lenses is hard; the properties of light mean that anything usable as a camera will be visible to the naked eye. Cameras can be small, but they cannot be arbitrarily small. Your "What then?" will never happen.
Also came here to discuss this. Super interesting opportunity to reverse what they're doing. Yeah I'd agree it's color filters which would avoid duplicating lenses (probably the most expensive component) or dividing the light energy. Filters would give you the most photons per color per shot. I wonder if the filters are mechanical or electronic somehow. As another commenter calculated, it's 10ms between shots, which is not that impractical to move physical filters around when you consider modern consumer camera shutter speeds of around 0.125 milliseconds max.
I like that they can use software in the camera to cut glass out of the lens. I have some pretty hefty glass, and if this is executed right (quality wise) it could be a big win -- even if they fix the focus like a traditional camera.
I wondered previously how feasible would it be to manufacture digital camera sensors with modified color filter mosaic, so instead of usual Bayer RGBG you would have RGB+589nm mosaic.
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