[HN Gopher] Nikon reveals a lens that captures wide and telephot...
___________________________________________________________________
Nikon reveals a lens that captures wide and telephoto images
simultaneously
Author : giuliomagnifico
Score : 166 points
Date : 2024-12-26 14:39 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.digitalcameraworld.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.digitalcameraworld.com)
| Neywiny wrote:
| Despite a number of what look like copy paste articles, I see no
| actual pictures of what the pictures taken look like. Maybe we'll
| see at CES but until then these feel like clickbait.
| kmlx wrote:
| official link:
| https://www.nikon.com/company/news/2024/1219_01.html
|
| still no photos, but they say more info will come during CES
| londons_explore wrote:
| I assume there are no photos because the actual images on the
| sensor will look like gibberish - it'll effectively be two
| different images overlaid, and look a total mess.
|
| However, feed that mess into AI, and it might successfully be
| able to use it to see both wide and far.
| idlerig wrote:
| If CAT scan imagery exists, I suppose this sort of image
| processing shouldn't be impossible to do-- though I readily
| admit I have no idea what the logic behind it might look
| like without some sort of wavelength-based filtering that
| would make a photographer shudder.
| ska wrote:
| Tomographic reconstruction is in principal pretty
| straightforward (Radon transform). MRI is much (much),
| fwiw, though RF not optics.
|
| I don't think wavelength filtering will help you here, as
| you don't control the input at all. Some sort of splitter
| in the optical chain might, but you'd be halving your
| imaging photons with all that entails. Or you can have
| e.g. a telephoto center and a wide fringe. It's an
| interesting idea.
| kylebenzle wrote:
| You are right.
| dannyw wrote:
| I mean, a lens is only a third of the camera, the other two
| being the sensor, and the ISP. A lens doesn't produce a photo
| in itself.
|
| This would be like someone announcing a new RAM innovation --
| and people asking what its Cinebench or Geekbench score is.
| pietro72ohboy wrote:
| A lens is a BIG part of the final image you get. So much so
| that the common advice in most photography forums is that
| within a price gap, buy the best lens you can find and an
| okay camera. Camera tech, especially in large dedicated full-
| frame and APS-C units, has plateaued since 2018, and most
| cameras from that period take exceptionally good pictures,
| even by today's standards. Thus, lens availability, price,
| and quality, as well as AF tracking, are what fundamentally
| differentiate modern cameras.
|
| EDIT: I got pulled into the discussion without reading the
| article. The lens is for industrial uses.
| pvaldes wrote:
| I would expect a big photo with an ok resolution including
| inside an area of much higher resolution (aka teleobjective
| part). That special area can be cropped later to obtain a
| much bigger photo with all the detail than a tele would
| bring.
| throwanem wrote:
| You're missing that this is not designed as a tool for
| photographers, but rather in a collaboration with
| Mitsubishi aimed at better situational awareness for
| vehicle operators. The headline doesn't mention this, but
| it's impossible to miss in the article.
| haswell wrote:
| In the context of the GP, I think the point still stands
| though which is roughly: "the lens matters a lot".
|
| Without knowing more about the optics, it's hard to know
| how much of a role the sensor/ISP play in the innovation,
| but those are well established and widely capable across
| both photographic and industrial use cases.
|
| Very curious to eventually learn more about this and
| whether it might eventually find its way into traditional
| cameras.
| throwanem wrote:
| Sure, I guess. But the whole discussion is so void of
| subject matter knowledge that it's like trying to argue
| the pros and cons of different bowling balls in terms of
| how well they pair with Brie.
|
| Nikon is an optics company that's also made cameras for a
| long time, and then very nearly didn't; before the Z
| mirrorless line took off, the company's future as a
| camera manufacturer was seriously in doubt. But even a
| Nikon that had stopped making cameras entirely after the
| D780 would still be an optics company. There is no
| serious reason to assume the necessity of some sensor/ISP
| "special sauce" behind the novel optics announced here to
| make the system work. And considering where Nikon's
| sensors actually come from, if there were more than novel
| optics involved here, I'd expect to see Sony also
| mentioned in the partnership.
|
| Of course that's not to say photographic art can't be
| made with commercial or industrial equipment; film
| hipsters notwithstanding, pictorialism in the digital era
| has never been more lively. But I would expect this to
| fall much in that same genre of "check out this wild shit
| I did with a junkyard/eBay/security system installer
| buddy find", rather than anything you'd expect to see on
| the other end of a lens barrel from a Z-mount flange.
| jfengel wrote:
| I couldn't tell from the article: is it for human
| eyeballs or for computers?
|
| If it's for eyeballs it would be nifty to know what kind
| of image displays both kinds of information at once.
|
| If it's for computers, what is the advantage over two
| cameras right next to each other? Less hardware? More
| accurate image recognition? Something else?
| throwanem wrote:
| These are questions for their CES presentation next week,
| not for me.
| sunnybeetroot wrote:
| I recommend reading the article if you haven't already as
| it mentions this is for vehicles, there isn't a mention of
| photographers.
| 4ad wrote:
| This is not a lens for photographers, it's an industrial
| piece of technology...
| surfingdino wrote:
| Technically speaking you do not need a lens to capture an
| image (see pinhole cameras) BUT for most applications a lens
| is a necessity. It is the first part of the image capture
| pipeline and has a huge influence over the final image.
| fragmede wrote:
| aren't there some cameras that have swappable lenses? Does
| Nikon know anything about those?
| alistairSH wrote:
| Yes. And yes. What's your point? The use case mentioned is
| AI/driver assist for vehicles.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| This is Nikon (and Mitsubishi). It will really work, but they
| hold their cards close to their chest, and embargo sample
| images (they don't like low-quality images getting out). They
| probably plan something splashy for CES.
|
| CES should be interesting, this year.
| arghwhat wrote:
| The intended output is, in essence, a wide-angle photo but with
| much greater detail in the center as if that portion had been
| taken by a telephoto lens and placed on top like smartphones do
| - but with no offset like smartphones normally deal with.
|
| The processed result would be quite uninteresting to look at:
| it's a wide-angle photo where the outer portion is much more
| blurry than the center. Considering the current intended
| application, the picture probably would probably be pretty
| mediocre.
|
| This is very specific technology that solves very specific
| problems (and might one day make its way to smartphones), but
| not something I'd expect to produce glamor shots right now.
| tyho wrote:
| I'm imaging a variable focal length across the image plane,
| decreasing as the distance to the centre increases.
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| I imagine two optical paths that coincide at the output. But
| who knows, no details are provided, so it's only speculation.
| CodeCompost wrote:
| Let me guess, it's going to be "AI assisted"
| bilinguliar wrote:
| They started the development in 2020, so it may still be a
| blockchain.
| jeffreygoesto wrote:
| It must be a lens that smoothly varies focal length depending on
| the distance from the center. You want pedestrians and bikes on
| the vicinity, as wide angle as possible and cars far away for
| emergency braking and ACC in the center of the image when going
| straight on a highway.
| mcdeltat wrote:
| This is fascinating, I didn't think that was possible.
|
| What would be the optimal sensor geometry for such a lens? The
| distortion would be crazy, wouldn't it? Nowhere near a
| rectilinear projection.
| zokier wrote:
| I don't know if it needs to be smoothly varying instead of
| having just two zones with a step between them.
|
| Either way, I'd expect it to need significant amount of
| processing to get anything useful.
| mikewarot wrote:
| I'm guessing it's a beam splitting prism with 2 paths, one for
| wide angle, and the other for telephoto. They used to make
| cameras with 3 ccds for color video.
| ruined wrote:
| the press release specifies there's no offset/parallax which
| would rule this out
| IshKebab wrote:
| No it wouldn't?
| tobyhinloopen wrote:
| no because the light enters the same lens
| londons_explore wrote:
| I'm guessing it's a regular camera lens, _surrounded_ by a wide
| angle lens which is donut-shaped.
|
| Both images end up superimposed on the sensor, and there is
| probably a lot of distortion too, but for AI that might not be
| an issue.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| Needlessly complex, and machine vision camera users don't
| like the ambiguity that comes with ML processing on the
| frontend of their own stuff.
| rurban wrote:
| And I would have no idea how to calibrate it.
|
| If it produces an EXR with clearly seperate images with
| different lenses, fine. Like a 3D EXR with left and right.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Depending on the lens production process, the
| relationship between the wide angle and regular angle
| might be fully defined (ie. you don't need to calibrate
| it, you can just read the transformation matrices off the
| datasheet and it's gonna be correct to within 0.1
| pixels).
| londons_explore wrote:
| True, but if you're going for frontend ML, which is
| effectively a black box anyway, you might as well have some
| non-human-understandable bits in the optics and hardware
| too.
|
| Various designs for microlens arrays do similar things -
| thousands of of 0.001 megapixel images from slightly
| different angles are fairly useless for most human uses,
| but to AI it could be a very powerful way to get depth
| info, cut the camera thickness by 10x, and have infinite
| depth of focus.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| not sure how you took the idea "we want wide and narrow
| views of the same perspective" and thought building a
| light field camera might be a practical approach
| mikewarot wrote:
| While it is possible to build a consumer lightfield
| camera (Lytro was one example), they aren't as magical as
| you might think until you get much larger lens sizes than
| people are going to tolerate to get appreciable zoom
| range.
|
| I did a bunch of manual creation of light-field photos
| over the years.[1] To get interesting compositions, you
| need an effective lens diameter of about 30 cm in
| diameter or more. To get super-resolution good enough for
| zoom, you're going to probably need something that size.
|
| [1] https://www.flickr.com/photos/---mike---/albums/72177
| 7202979...
| 0_____0 wrote:
| Not disputing the feasibility of light field imaging.
| That approach really doesn't do anything for the use case
| the camera Nikon/Mitsubishi are showcasing. Light field
| cameras have low resolution for their sensor sizes, lower
| optical efficiency, are expensive to manufacture, require
| processing that would make this a bad fit for the near-
| realtime ADAS functions you need for automotive machine
| vision, and have no advantage when it comes to favoring
| one part of the image in terms of angular resolution.
|
| Like, why even mention them?
| 0_____0 wrote:
| From my time with optics this seems the most likely setup.
| Getting good optical efficiency out of the setup might take
| some cleverness though - ideally you're not dumping loads of
| light that are "out of frame" for one sensor.
|
| The other option is concentric optics with a pick out mirror
| for the central light path. Bit harder to make but you get more
| flexibility re: how much of your light collecting area gets
| split to which sensor.
| Anotheroneagain wrote:
| This has no future with 200mpx sensors becoming common.
| ruined wrote:
| 200mpx sensors have an incredible future with this becoming
| available
| tobyhinloopen wrote:
| You'd need some incredible amount of processing power to
| process all that data, and it also assumes the lens is even
| "sharp enough" to capture that resolution.
|
| Even high-end full frame lenses + sensors with a fixed focal
| length struggle to reach 200MP of detail. (60MP Sony A7RV
| with pixel shift can take pictures with 240MP). No way this
| weird monstrosity can get anywhere near 200MP in a moving
| vehicle.
| fredwu wrote:
| Cropping isn't the same as capturing at a different focal
| length.
| wvbdmp wrote:
| Isn't it optically? Ignoring lens imperfections and assuming
| infinite resolution, you should get the same image cropping
| vs. equivalent focal length, no?
| tobyhinloopen wrote:
| I think it does, yes. Cropping 25% of the center of a 35mm
| F/2.0, you'd get the equivalent of a 70mm F/4.0, but with
| only 25% of the pixels obviously.
| GiovanniP wrote:
| I expect depth of focus to be different.
| Kubuxu wrote:
| Yes, depth of focus will be larger, as signified by the
| larger f-number.
| tobyhinloopen wrote:
| It will not, I specifically included the F-stops for that
| reason.
|
| The depth of field is determined by the focus distance
| and the aperture of the lens. Both remain unchanged.
|
| Note that 35mm F/2.0 is the same aperture as 70mm F/4.0.
| Both lenses have an aperture of 17.5mm. (35/2.0 ==
| 70/4.0)
|
| You can easily verify this with your favorite zoom lens.
| If you have an 24-70 F/2.8 available to you, you can
| verify by taking 2 pictures; one at 35mm F/2.8 and one at
| 70mm F/5.6. Crop the 35mm one to 25% area (half the
| width, half the height). Render both images to the same
| size (print, fill screen, whatever) and see for yourself.
| GiovanniP wrote:
| > assuming infinite resolution
|
| this is an assumption that goes against the concept of
| "f-number" so if one does it, they should not expect to get
| to anything sensible.
| wvbdmp wrote:
| I just meant sensor pixels, because you're obviously
| losing those when cropping, but you get the same
| perspective as from larger focal length (since you're not
| moving).
| GiovanniP wrote:
| I agree that the images correspond to the same region in
| object space. Further assumptions on optical resolution
| don't work well, as the optical resolution _depends_ on
| the f-number.
| Anotheroneagain wrote:
| The angular resolution depends purely on the aperture
| diameter, not the f-number. There should be no difference
| between capturing the image in high resolution, and
| blowing it up for a lower resolution sensor. All that
| should be needed is a 200mpx sensor that can output the
| entire frame in 12mpx, and 12mpx of the central area in
| full resolution. It's similar to how our eyes work.
| mcdeltat wrote:
| I think it's not the same. Changing focal length changes
| the perspective warping, right? That's why fisheye lenses
| look crazy, and telephoto lenses "compress" depth. This
| might be a function of the sensor geometry too, though.
| john2x wrote:
| Cropping the centre of a fisheye photo will look the same
| as a normal or telephoto lens if they are taken at the
| same distance (the crop will have less resolution of
| course)
| mcdeltat wrote:
| After looking it up, yes you are right, they are the
| same. I was thinking of changing the distance to subject
| instead.
| Anotheroneagain wrote:
| Fisheye lenses look crazy because they are deliberately
| made that way. Rectilinear lenses don't do it.
| Torkel wrote:
| So it's a fisheye lens?
|
| If you plot pixels per degree over the field of view of a fisheye
| lens you will see that vastly more pixels are dedicated to the
| center "eye". And also the field of view is large. Which is what
| this novel lens claims to also do.
| Onavo wrote:
| The fisheye transform is destructive though. Reversing it is a
| probabilistic process (not really a big problem now with
| generative ML but still)
| nuccy wrote:
| No it is not destructive, math-wise the transformation is
| bidirectional and can be used many times without any detail
| losses. The problem is sampling by the image sensor, some
| pixels endup with larger fiel-of-view than others, so
| reconstructed flat image of fractions of the fisheye would
| have different sharpness over the frame.
| hengheng wrote:
| I wouldn't want generative ML to infest my car's safety
| features tbh.
|
| Fortunately you are wrong.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| No, a fisheye is still just a very wide lens with a single
| focal length. This lens claims to have two focal lengths.
| michaelt wrote:
| It might be like that - but there are other options as well.
|
| There are companies that make stereo lenses, capturing two
| images side-by-side on a single sensor, for people who want to
| take 3D photos on their interchangeable-lens cameras. And there
| are "anamorphic" lenses that squeeze things horizontally but
| not vertically - in digital terms, producing non-square pixels.
| Very popular in films in the 70s and 80s. And when it comes to
| corrective glasses, bifocal and varifocal/progressive lenses
| are another common type of lens providing variable optical
| properties.
|
| Self-driving cars need to deal with both "stopped at a
| crosswalk, are there pedestrians?" (which needs a wide view)
| and "driving at 70mph, stopping distance about 300 feet, what's
| that thing 300 feet away?" (which needs a zoomed in view)
|
| If you look at https://www.pexels.com/photo/city-street-in-
| fisheye-16209078... for example - it's wide (which is good) but
| the details at 300 feet ahead aren't winning any prizes. Far
| more pixels are wasted on useless sky than are used on the road
| ahead.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| Side by side seems unlikely in this as they claim both lenses
| have the same optical axis. But good to mention in the
| overview you give here.
| usrusr wrote:
| On an only slightly related note, I'd be happy if the same was
| available on smartphones, _in software_ : my mobile photography
| is of the school "take a lot and discard almost as many" and
| having to choose between the different lens/sensor pairs ahead of
| snap is entirely alien to that process. So the camera software is
| forever set to that main lense and all the other ones are just
| dead weight in my pocket (and stuff manufacturers don't allow me
| to not buy when I need a new phone, preferably one with a good
| main camera)
|
| I think I understand that the precessor would not be able to read
| out the sensors at the same time, but time-multiplexed bracketing
| has been done before, it really should not be too hard or weird
| to apply that concept to multiple sensors? (some sensors with
| integrated memory might even be able to do concurrent
| capture/deferred readout?)
| disillusioned wrote:
| This feels like the kind of thing that's so obvious it's hard
| to believe it isn't being pursued... Google could, for example,
| make a _huge_ splash with the Pixel 10 by presenting this with
| the option of after-the-fact optical zoom or wide angle shots,
| or using the multiple lenses for some fancy fusing for
| additional detail. And to your point, DSLRs have been doing
| deferred readout in the sense of storing to an on-device cache
| before writing out to the SD card while waiting for previous
| frames to complete their write ops... this same sort of concept
| should be able to apply here.
|
| I don't know much more about the computational photography
| pipeline, but I imagine there might be some tricky bits around
| focusing across multiple lenses simultaneously, around managing
| the slight off-axis offset (though that feels more trivial
| nowadays), and, as you say, around reading from the sensors
| into memory, but then also how to practically merge or not-
| merge the various shots. Google already does this with stacked
| photos that include, say, a computationally blurred/portrait
| shot alongside the primary sensor capture before that
| processing was done, so the bones are there for something
| similar... but to really take advantage of it would likely
| require some more work.
|
| But this is all by way of saying, this would be really really
| cool and would open up a lot of potential opportunities.
| forkerenok wrote:
| > Google could, for example, make a _huge_ splash with the
| Pixel 10 by presenting this with the option of after-the-fact
| optical zoom...
|
| Pardon my ignorance, but isn't this just an inferior version
| of after-the-fact photo capture?
|
| On a serious note, what do you really mean by this? I have
| trouble imagining how that would work.
| klausa wrote:
| The biggest issue with doing this, for most people, is that
| now each of your photos is 3x time the size and they need to
| spend more on their phones and/or cloud storage.
| photorank wrote:
| What we really need is a better way of paring down the N
| photos you take of a given subject into the one or two
| ideal lens*adjustments*cropping tuples.
|
| I'm imagining you open a "photo session" when you open the
| camera, and all photos taken in that session are grouped
| together. Later, you can go into each session and some AI
| or whatever spits out a handful of top edits for you to
| consider, and you delete the rest.
|
| Use case is for taking photos with children or another
| animals where you need approx 50 photos to get one where
| they're looking at the camera with their eyes open and a
| smile, then today you need to manually perform some
| atrocious O(N*K) procedure to get the best K of the N
| photos.
| usrusr wrote:
| Even a simple "A vs B" selection process would be an
| improvement to what most of what we spray'n'pray
| photographers currently use. It's been forever on my list
| of mobile apps I might want to write (I expect that
| similar things exists, but I also kind of expect that
| they are all filled with other features that I really
| would not want to have)
| p1mrx wrote:
| What if you make an AVIF image sequence, with the zoomed
| photo followed by the wide angle photo? Presumably AV1 is
| smart enough to compress the second based on the first.
| eichin wrote:
| If the Light L16
| https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/4/10/17218758/l...
| hadn't failed, you might have seen this (as the "weaker but
| still useful" version of the tech spread down-market.)
|
| But I'm not sure what you mean by "choosing lens/sensor pairs"
| - do any modern phones even expose that? The samsung version is
| just "you zoom. Occasionally the field of view jumps awkwardly
| sideways because it switched lenses."
| usrusr wrote:
| But zooming _is_ lens selection (if implemented like that). I
| don 't want to be bothered with zooming. A full frame of each
| sensor, pick and crop later.
|
| I want to point the side with the cameras at whatever I want
| to take a picture of, hit the release button and move on. All
| that careful framing? That might be enjoyable to do ahead of
| time if you take pictures of carefully arranged flower
| bouquets or something like that, but that's very far from
| many of the use cases of the always-at-hand camera. Give me
| ultrawide, tele and whatever exists in between at a single
| press of a button and let me go back to whatever I was doing
| while the desire to persist a visual situation came up.
| Memory is cheap, selection is a chore but one that can be
| done time-shifted. I'm not suggesting to take away your ahead
| of time framing, I'm just longing for an option to simply
| read them all (sequentially, if necessary). Perhaps even
| throw in a readout of the selfie-cam for good measure.
| Uncorrelated wrote:
| iPhones can do this. They support taking photos simultaneously
| from the two or three cameras on the back; the cameras are
| hardware-synchronized and automatically match their settings to
| provide similar outputs. The catch is you need a third-party
| app to access it, and you'll end up with two or three separate
| photos per shot which you'll have to manage yourself. You also
| won't get manual controls over white balance, focus, or ISO,
| and you can't shoot in RAW or ProRAW.
|
| There are probably a good number of camera apps that support
| this mode; two I know of are ProCam 8 and Camera M.
| deskr wrote:
| A picture is worth a thousand words. Yet, in an article about a
| camera lens, there isn't a single picture from it.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Maybe because that's the most exciting and revealing part of
| the tech?
|
| Or maybe the output is boring. i.e. two different output
| streams with acceptably sharp image with well controlled
| distortion.
| surfingdino wrote:
| There're only 312 words in that article. Clearly not worth even
| one picture.
| interludead wrote:
| It's nice to see innovation in optics yet I think it's more for
| niche scenarios like sports
| arghwhat wrote:
| nit: All wide lenses also capture a "telephoto" image in the
| center. The only thing a telephoto lens does is to spread that
| image out over the whole sensor.
|
| Maybe their lens is variable focal length, providing more
| magnification in the center at a presumed cost of clarity.
| mannykannot wrote:
| I wonder whether that is entirely so (though the difference may
| not be relevant for the intended applications of this lens.)
| The reason I say this is that one can often tell whether a
| telephoto lens is being used at long range, as opposed to a
| normal lens at shorter distance, by the way the former seems to
| compress the longitudinal axis (at least when one is watching a
| movie rather than a still image.) This effect seems to me to be
| independent of focal depth, in that it does not seem to depend
| on having nearby or distant objects markedly out-of-focus,
| though I may be mistaken about this. Do magnified long-distance
| movies shot with normal focal-length lenses look like their
| telephoto equivalents?
| colanderman wrote:
| Yes, mathematically telephoto is exactly just cropped wide
| angle. The same light field is falling on the front element
| of either lens so, modulo focus effects and distortion, it
| could not be otherwise.
|
| (Differing projections/distortions such as fisheye are
| likewise exactly equivalent to mathematical transforms for
| the same reason.)
|
| You can see that this is true when using a (physical) zoom
| lens. When zooming, there is no change in the projected image
| of any sort other than it simply grows larger.
|
| The effect you are referring to is complementary to parallax
| and is likewise due exactly to physical proximity to or
| distance from the subject being photographed. (Telephoto
| lenses require the subject to be further away to remain in
| the frame; in doing so, they move relatively closer to the
| background, thus longitudinally compressing the scene.)
| tonyarkles wrote:
| This is definitely a real effect. I can't doodle this out
| right now but if you grab a piece of paper and draw out the
| triangles for a pinhole camera with different focal lengths
| you can see how the angles (and horizontal separation at the
| image plane) are quite different with different focal
| lengths.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| > Do magnified long-distance movies shot with normal focal-
| length lenses look like their telephoto equivalents?
|
| Generally, I think the answer is yes. But the more
| complicated answer is that every lens design has its own
| flavor of distortion. An image from a lens optimized for
| telephoto shots is going to have slightly different
| characteristics than a cropped image from a lens optimized
| for wide shots.
|
| The compressed effect I _think_ you are referring to is
| likely attributable to perspective, most noticeable when the
| movie does one of those zoom shots where they keep the
| subject at the same relative size in the frame while moving
| the camera in or out. Like on this shot:
| https://youtu.be/in_mAvHu9E4?t=19
| pdpi wrote:
| The source of that compression effect is the relative
| distances top the sensor of different elements in the picture
| - so a result of long vs short range, rather than long vs
| short focal length. At a long range, your nose is 1% closer
| to sensor than your eyes are. At a _really_ close range, it's
| maybe 50% closer to the sensor than your eyes are. Given a
| fixed range, though, you can achieve the same look by using a
| long lens, or by cropping a shot taken with a shorter lens.
|
| The thing is, distance and focal length aren't independent.
| People don't usually shoot long lenses in close quarters, and
| don't shoot distant subjects with wide angle lenses, we just
| tend to fill our frames with the subject. That means the
| compression effect is technically not related to focal
| length, but in practice ends up showing up more when using
| longer lenses.
| SomeHacker44 wrote:
| I am guessing it is some sort of anamorphic lens that has the
| center portion telephoto and then smears out the wide angle
| around the edges of the sensor. So you need a translation
| algorithm to get back to a normal image.
| diggernet wrote:
| I imagine it taking pictures like this:
|
| https://www.escherinhetpaleis.nl/escher-today/balcony/?lang=...
| neallindsay wrote:
| Like many here, my first thought was "telephoto is just a crop of
| a wide-angle, so what are they bragging about?" Here's my
| speculation:
|
| Most lenses are "distortion corrected" because they assume they
| will be displayed on a flat surface. A little explanation for
| those not familiar: When you take a picture of a brick wall with
| your camera parallel to the wall, notice that the bricks on the
| edge of the photo are the same size as the ones in the center,
| even though the edge bricks are further away from the camera.
| This means more pixels are allocated per degree of view near the
| edge of the field-of-view than at the center.
|
| An "uncorrected" lens is basically what we would call a "fish-
| eye" lens. Here (ideally) the same number of pixels are in a one-
| degree circle in the center of the field-of-view as are in a one-
| degree circle near the edge.
|
| I don't think they would crow about just using an "uncorrected"
| lens either, so I'm going to guess that this is a "reverse-
| corrected" lens system where a one-degree circle in the center
| gets _more_ pixels than it would at the edge. This would be the
| obvious approach if they want a good center crop but want to
| capture all the periphery as well.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| This sounds pretty elegant but I don't think it's correct.
|
| I don't have a good sense for what the R&D required to spin up
| a new bespoke sensor is, but I think it's sort of high - I
| assume there's a reason Nikon seem to source most of their
| sensors from Sony. Assuming you get to use a custom sensor for
| your camera, you also lose a bit of sensitivity at the "fovea."
|
| Also, Nikon's own press release also refer specifically to an
| "optical lens system with both telephoto and wide-angle lens
| functions," which leads me to believe this isn't an innovation
| at the sensor level.
| gavinsyancey wrote:
| I don't think the parent comment is saying this is a new
| sensor; rather that the lens spreads the center over a wider
| area of the sensor (hence more pixels) and squeezes the edges
| into a smaller area (hence less pixels).
| neallindsay wrote:
| I was talking about the lens achieving the difference in
| image distribution across the sensor, not a sensor with non-
| uniform pixels.
| mortenjorck wrote:
| Exactly; in other words, a telephoto may just be "a crop of a
| wide-angle," but in a wide-angle lens, the area any given field
| of view covers on a sensor will always be lower resolution than
| than if it were spread across the entire sensor by a telephoto
| lens.
|
| Given the automotive context of this product, I would expect
| the goal was to maximize the resolution for center FOV (more
| clearly resolve objects further down the road) while
| simultaneously maximizing the overall FOV angle (see closer
| objects in peripheral vision).
|
| In practice, the raw image probably looks like the old
| Photoshop "bulge" filter, and then somewhere in the image
| pipeline, it will get reprojected into a regular image that is
| quite blurry at the edges and becomes increasingly high-res
| toward the center.
|
| (Another way of looking at this would be that this is an
| optical adaptation to the uniform, cartesian nature of image
| sensors, allowing a "foveated" image without a gradation in
| sensor pixel density.)
| DarkSucker wrote:
| Neither the article nor official link gave much optical design
| detail. Here's my guess. A (substantially) radially symmetric
| system comprising a wide-angle positive-short-focal-length first
| lens followed closely by a negative-short-focal-length whose
| diameter is small (thus covering a small range of angles, in the
| center field of view, from the first lens). A single central
| sensor behind the negative element is for telephoto images, while
| a collection of sensors distributed radially around the first
| lens and off axis capture wide angle images.
|
| Imagine a low-index ball lens in contact with a thin high-index
| negative lens. That's the idea. I'm sure the real design uses
| multiple surfaces/elements for each lens, and I'm sure it's
| hyper-optimized. I'm interested to learn how close my guess is to
| reality.
|
| Apologies for the complex wording to describe geometry.
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