I'm an avid photographer who started out with SLRs back in the 1970s. I do have a DSLR, but most of the pictures I take now are with my phone, currently a Pixel 4a. One of the main reasons for getting a Pixel was the quality and features of Google's camera. But I have to admit that I'm jealous of my wife's new Samsung phone, which has three cameras, including a 3x optical zoom. But all that hardware makes for a large, bulky camera bump on the back of the phone.
That may be about to change if this article is any indication.
A company named Metalenz is promoting a technology called optical metasurfaces. To me, it seems similar to the micro-mirror arrays used in digital projectors, or possibly ulta-small and high-resultion Fresnel lenses. A flat sensor array would replace all of the lenses currently used in phones.
Phone makers like Apple have increased the number of lens elements over time, and while some, like Samsung, are now folding optics to create “periscope” lenses for greater zoom capabilities, companies have generally stuck with the tried-and-true stacked lens element system.
“The optics became more sophisticated, you added more lens elements, you created strong aspheric elements to achieve the necessary reduction in space, but there was no revolution in the past 10 years in this field,” Schindelbeck says.
This is where Metalenz comes in. Instead of using plastic and glass lens elements stacked over an image sensor, Metalenz's design uses a single lens built on a glass wafer that is between 1x1 to 3x3 millimeter in size. Look very closely under a microscope and you'll see nanostructures measuring one-thousandth the width of a human hair. Those nanostructures bend light rays in a way that corrects for many of the shortcomings of single-lens camera systems.
I can't wait to see this happen. So which phone company will be the first to use it? I'm betting on Apple. What do you think?
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