This is so good it's a simulcast
The Economist reports this week on a French company that is updating an 18th century technology so that we really can leave the camera at home and rely on our camera phones to do all we need as far as taking snaps is concerned.
Rather than making solid (eg glass or Perspex) lenses, the French company called Varioptic is working on liquid lenses. The Economist article says:
... To make a solid zoom lens zoom, you have to move the individual elements relative to one another. In a liquid zoom lens, by contrast, you only have to change their shape. That means a liquid zoom can be much slimmer than a glass one.
Varioptic's zoom is not quite there yet. The prototype is 27mm (just over an inch) from front to back, which is a bit deep for a phone and it can manage a zoom magnification of only two and a half times, which is not even as good as the threefold magnification of current phone zooms. But this performance is likely to improve soon and once liquid lenses work as well as their solid counterparts their other advantages will become apparent.
The first of these is speed. A liquid lens can shift its magnification in milliseconds. Mechanical lenses are much slower. Liquid lenses are also cheaper. A liquid zoom should cost around $25, whereas the existing mechanical zooms cost $'00.
Liquid zooms are sturdier than their solid counterparts, a particularly important advantage for mobile phones ... Since a liquid lens has no mechanical moving parts there are, quite simply, fewer things to break in it. And despite their being liquid, the minute size of the droplets that compose the lenses means the surface tension between the two fluids is so strong that they stay unstirred, no matter how violently they are shaken ...
Marvellous!
DW
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