Wired.com has a fascinating report on a prototype camera designed by a student at Stanford.
What's so special? The camera boasts 16 megapixels and a 'bevy' of micro lenses that allows users to take photographs
and later refocus them using specially written software.
The student, Ren Ng, claims that even if the image is out of focus it can be modified in a way that greatly surpasses anything possible in Photoshop. The camera operates like a 'normal' camera but has a microlens array positioned between the sensor and main lens creating a plenoptic camera. Getting a bit too technical for the likes of me but each microlens measures not just the amount of light but also how much light arrives along each ray.
His Stanford page has a series of media player video clips demonstrating how the camera deals with various images and focal depths.
1. It is important to note, regarding this technology, that each pixel in the final image is drawn from an array of pixels on the CCD, effectly reducing the resolution by an order of magnitude. The actual image resolution in the case you wrote about is 296x296, after applying the micro-lens array.
Eventually, sensors will be built to provide sufficient resolution to make this a non-issue. I only mention it because your entry cites 16 mega-pixels, which is a little misleading.
Posted at 6:27AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Douglas Toltzman