Get rid of that weird camera bump on your smartphone
If you have the latest, newest, most beautiful smartphone, there is still such a strange camera bump on it. Get rid of it!
2007 was a great year, when the iPhone came out for the first time. This iPhone had a camera of only 2 megapixels, impossible to imagine now. There was no selfie camera either, what a time. Now you can no longer do without multiple cameras on the front and back. Some sensors are now 108 megapixels, just think of the Samsung S21 Ultra. But the lenses have actually remained unchanged all along. A new company wants to equip smartphone cameras with flat lens systems. By adjusting this, that weird camera bump on the back of your smartphone can disappear.
Flatter, prettier and better
Never heard of the Metaalz company? That’s right, neither do we. But they want to start making smartphone cameras with a single flat lens system, using a technology called ‘metasurfaces’. This allows the camera to produce images of at least the same quality as traditional lenses. It is even expected that the images will be better and sharper than the lenses that we now use in our smartphones.
The camera bumps on current smartphones are because we want to do more and more with our cameras. These have almost replaced the ordinary still cameras, so the demands are high today. Irregularities in photos or videos are unacceptable. And we all want to zoom in at some point. To meet these requirements, manufacturers put more lenses in our smartphones. Apple and Samsung understand this and have increased lens elements significantly over the years. Especially at Samsung, to use the ‘periscope’ lenses for those larger zoom options. Stacking these does take up space and that is why the camera bump keeps getting bigger and bigger.
In their design they use a single lens that is as small as 1 × 1 and 3 × 3 millimeters and is built on a so-called ‘glass wafer’. This instead of plastic and glass lens elements stacked over an image sensor. And they’re not bakeries, if we read it like that. The CEO Robert Devlin was working on his PhD at the prestigious Harvard University in America. He spent ten years working on a solution together with co-founder Federico Capasso. He is a well-known physicist and together they founded the company in 2017.
Just as a curved lens speeds up and slows down light to bend it, we can all do the same thing so that we can bend and shape light by changing the diameters of these circles.
Devlin
So great developments, which are still in their infancy. It will take a while before the technology is ready for mass production, but the first optimistic reports have arrived.
