Newswise — The camera phone is one of the hottest-selling items in all of consumer electronics, with anticipated sales this year of 170 million units, and analysts expect that this year camera phones will outsell both conventional digital cameras and traditional film cameras combined.
But the images that come out of camera phones leave plenty to be desired. Part of the problem is their CMOS imaging chips, which typically have a sensor array of only about 300 kilopixels--a quarter or less the number in a low-end digital camera. Of course, semiconductor industry fundamentals assure that 1-megapixel camera phones will soon be the norm. When they are, however, the only thing we may see more clearly is the other weakness of those cameras: their tiny, fixed-focus lenses that have poor light-gathering and resolving power.
But a new type of lens, modeled on the human eye, varies its focus by changing shape rather than by changing the relative position of multiple lenses, as high-quality camera lenses do. It can be made nearly as small as a fixed-focus lens, which uses a small aperture and short focal length to keep most things in focus, but at the sacrifice of light-gathering power and therefore picture quality.
At the same time, it can deliver picture sharpness that is easily on a par with that of a variable-focus lens. In fact, the optical quality of a liquid lens combined with a megapixel imaging chip could soon give cellphone snapshots quality that rivals images from conventional--and much bulkier--digital cameras.
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