Ultra thin telephoto lens to revolutionise camera phones
February 2, 2007
Engineers in California have announced the development of a new lens that could drastically improve the quality of camera phone images.
Researchers at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) created the ultra thin camera using origami to fold up the telephoto lens. They are hoping that the development will yield thin and lightweight high resolution cameras for use in mobile phones.
The resulting imager is around seven times more powerful than a standard lens of the same depth meaning cameras can now be much thinner and more powerful at the same time.
Joseph Ford, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the Jacobs School who leads the camera project, commented:
This type of miniature camera is very promising for applications where you want high resolution images and a short exposure time. This describes what cell phone cameras want to be when they grow up.Today’s cell phone cameras are pretty good for wide angle shots, but because space constraints require short focal length lenses, when you zoom them in, they’re terrible. They’re blurry, dark, and low contrast.
In order to reduce the camera thickness while retaining high resolution and good light collection the team replaced the lens with a folded optical system similar to old telescopes such as the Cassegrain, developed in 1672.
To reduce camera thickness but retain good light collection and high-resolution capabilities, Tremblay and colleagues replaced the traditional lens with a “folded” optical system that is based on an extension of conventional astronomical telescopes that employed mirrors, such as the Cassegrain telescope, which was developed in 1672.
Instead of using mirrors the team used a 5 millimeter thick optical crystal to bend and focus a beam of light. The resulting resolution is the same as in a conventional mirrored lens seven times thicker.
Tremblay stated that
Traditional camera lenses are typically made up of many different lens elements that work together to provide a sharp, high quality image. Here we did much the same thing, but the elements are folded on top of one another to reduce the thickness of the optic. Our ‘folded lens’ is not technically a lens, since it is reflective. I am guilty of calling it a lens sometimes, but I’m trying to control myself. ‘Imager,’ or ‘folded optic’ are more accurate.
Although the technology is not new, recent advances in the mechanical machining process of “diamond turning” have allowed the development of these types of lenses.
The team is hopeful that the technology will find its way into camera phones and believe that it’s a strong possibility.
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