For many people, the 8-megapixel photos
their smartphone camera takes are good enough. Those that want more
than a quick snapshot could spend hundreds to thousands of dollars on a
digital SLR camera. But even the fanciest consumer camera doesn’t hold a candle to David Brady’s project at Duke University. His customized camera takes photos that are gigapixels in size, dwarfing the best SLRs.
Normally, if you want a bigger photo, you would get a wider camera lens. But it’s more complicated than that—the lens also has to be able to bring the visual field into focus and form a clear image. Increasing the size of the lens alone introduces geometric aberrations, which ultimately result in blur. The most expensive lenses (some of which can cost more than the cameras they’re attached to) are made to reduce these aberrations as best they can.
Brady opted for a different approach. Rather than force a single lens to do all the work, he took advantage of the fact that smaller lenses found in microcameras don’t have large aberrations, even if they don’t cover as much space. If he grouped multiple microcameras into an array, he thought, then they could all take pictures simultaneously. Each microcamera’s picture could be stitched together with its neighbors, resulting in a big and detailed photo.
Normally, if you want a bigger photo, you would get a wider camera lens. But it’s more complicated than that—the lens also has to be able to bring the visual field into focus and form a clear image. Increasing the size of the lens alone introduces geometric aberrations, which ultimately result in blur. The most expensive lenses (some of which can cost more than the cameras they’re attached to) are made to reduce these aberrations as best they can.
Brady opted for a different approach. Rather than force a single lens to do all the work, he took advantage of the fact that smaller lenses found in microcameras don’t have large aberrations, even if they don’t cover as much space. If he grouped multiple microcameras into an array, he thought, then they could all take pictures simultaneously. Each microcamera’s picture could be stitched together with its neighbors, resulting in a big and detailed photo.
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