Next Generation of Lens?

PeterWright wrote on 11/18/2009, 4:33 AM
I've just watched Australia's New Inventors program, and was interested to see an invention from here in Perth - the LiveLens.

The principle is - when shooting a mixture of bright and dark, instead of having to set aperture for one or the other, the lens is made up of thousands of pixels which can each adjust to its own part of the frame. It's still at prototype stage, but the idea is brilliant.

More here:
http://www.livetechnologies.com.au/

Comments

JJKizak wrote on 11/18/2009, 10:08 AM
I thought lens were made of glass.
JJK
apit34356 wrote on 11/18/2009, 12:08 PM
"I thought lens were made of glass." LOL glass+glue+coatings+gas..... hahaha


There is a lot research going on with micro lens on the CCD surface helping to collect more light, but remove incident light. Whats really neat is the work on floating bubble lens permitting micro focusing of the light per pixel and as posted above, some dimming/filtering. But this technology really needs a very large dynamic range ccd but still will require some lens aperture to assist low light to sunlight range. As the dynamic range jumps to 24 bits per pixel, the processing power of the CCD becomes critical, plus single column chains become un-usable.... This where Sony's multi-column design shines, but the power of a GPU chip design is needed. ;-)

farss wrote on 11/18/2009, 2:14 PM
There's been a security camera around for a long time that solves the problem by taking two images, one with a normal shutter speed and one with a high shutter speed. The in camera processor then merges the two.

Looking at the LiveLens demo footage does not inspire. The resultant images look horrid, I think the guys with a big truck will be doing OK for at least another decade.


Bob.
rmack350 wrote on 11/18/2009, 6:04 PM
That's interesting, Bob. I'd had the same idea about 2 images being composited back together about 20 years ago. Can you give me a link to the product?

Rob
farss wrote on 11/18/2009, 7:05 PM
"Can you give me a link to the product?"

Damn it, no. They used to be sold by a company down here called Allthings. The camera was made in Taiwan by a company called Go Video. The camera is gone from Allthings website and I can no longer even find the manufacturer in Taiwan. It was a C Mount security camera with a DSP and was around $600 which is quite expensive for a security camera. I've only seen a couple of frame grabs from it and for security they'd be great but at least one of them had that overdone, unnatural look of some HDR images.

Bob.
apit34356 wrote on 11/19/2009, 2:45 AM
"one with a normal shutter speed and one with a high shutter speed" the problem of this design is movement in the focal plane ( not backplane). The shutter speed must be the same, a few designs try using splitters, but that hurts the low end. Of course, increasing the optics diameter can help, but special lens are expensive.