shakeshuck
Member
This morning I found myself in a waiting room glancing over a 12-month old issue of New Scientist. In it was a brief article that I thought was worthy of mentioning here in order to start a discussion.
In my own words:
If we take the example of the human eye as a camera, in principle, the lens system used is far simpler than the equipment we have for everyday use. This is due to the curvature of the back of the eye. With a curved 'film plane' we no longer have to correct for focus away from the centre of the image, we don't get those super-wide distortions, there is no light drop-off at the edges, etc.
If we assume a digital future (no bendy bits of film
) maybe the way forward is to have curved CCDs and much simpler lens designs.
Apparently some progress has been made in this direction, but (there's always a but) it's not currently an easy task to build CCDs in this way.
Speculations please...
In my own words:
If we take the example of the human eye as a camera, in principle, the lens system used is far simpler than the equipment we have for everyday use. This is due to the curvature of the back of the eye. With a curved 'film plane' we no longer have to correct for focus away from the centre of the image, we don't get those super-wide distortions, there is no light drop-off at the edges, etc.
If we assume a digital future (no bendy bits of film
) maybe the way forward is to have curved CCDs and much simpler lens designs.Apparently some progress has been made in this direction, but (there's always a but) it's not currently an easy task to build CCDs in this way.
Speculations please...