Post PureView: Graphene sensors and Trillion FPS cameras that can look around the corner
This is really two separate posts in one which I’m tying up together because they’re sort of related.
What happens now after PureView? Well, the first direct story is actually something Nokia’s looking into. Graphene sensors. Graphene is regarded as the new miracle nano material, famously presented in the Nokia Morph concept.
Check out BBC Click’s article on Graphene for more which showcases, Nokia Morph.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/9491789.stm
UnwiredView reports that Nokia have filed a patent for a graphene photo sensor.
Staska explains this would perform better than equivalent CMOS sensors in low light, as well as being much slimmer. Think of that PureView bulge being just as powerful in a smaller package. Think again were Nokia to remain being daring and stick even more power into PureView. Finally it would apparently be cheaper to produce.
This is something in the very distant future with regards to this camera femto tech being in a phone. Similarly, and onto our next story, the 1000FPS camera. Watch the TED presentation. They actually make note of the fact that imaging should switch from thinking about more megapixels is better 
(well it is if you do it the Nokia way) and focus on the next dimension of imaging.
In this video you can see a pulse of photons on ‘video’ passing through a bottle of water. It’s quite amazing. To see a bullet played at the same speed, you’d be watching it for a whole year!
What can you do with this? Plenty of things. In the video they explain how it could be used to see if fruit is ripe. Well, not the coolest application. What does seem even more amazing is how they can use this technology to ‘see’ around corners.
They also envisioned this eventually arriving into phones, but again, quite far ahead into the future.
Whilst I’m here, let me stick a third one we might have mentioned before. Lytro – lightfield camera where you can choose the focus point AFTER you’ve taken the photo. It’s a bit like those 38mp camera – you choose to zoom in AFTER
Cheers all for the Graphene tip!
Category: Nokia
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Nokia will be long gone before these new techs are useable in actual products.
And 808′s hump is mainly because of optics, not the sensor’s thickness. And it’s the sensor’s large area what makes it necessary to use longer focal length and thus the hump. Unless they can make the sensors smaller in area, the hump will stay. Or they somehow change the laws of physics.
Well, graphene transistors are at atomic level so it seems the sensors could be smaller than the current ones.
They would have to come up with something that is really new and pushing the boundaries. At the moment pixels in mobile phone camera sensors are somewhere between 1 and 1,5 micrometers, while wavelength of visible light is between 380 and 760 nanometers.
If you can sample at a high enough speed you can can create the focus by adding delays to individual pixels before adding them to create the focused data. This is how ultrasound scanners work.
The problem is that the speed of light is very fast and so the sample frequency would be very high, so they control the light source and synchronize the data from multiple transmission to create the result.
Is there any point to Lytro given that EDoF solves the depth of field problem anyway?
Oh yeah, I forgot. Nobody likes EDoF because It doesn’t deliver lovely blurriness and out-of-focus photos. Not without some simple post-processing anyway.
I strongly suspect Lytro is based on EDoF principles, given that in theory it should be possible to calculate depth information from the RAW sensor data of an EDoF photo.