That image doesn’t look exciting at all but it’s precious because it’s actually the first photo taken with a Sony curved sensor!
It has been shared by Sony to Nikkei.jp. NIkkei reports the sensor are production ready and while the sensor has plenty of advantages (no vignetting, allows faster and compact lens design and so on) it has also one huge issue. Sony said it’s very difficult to design zoom lenses for it.
Sony is rumored to launch such a sensor with the next RX1 fixed lens successor!
8 Responses
Sony is definitely leading in innovation. The other manufacturers are still producing cameras with about the same specs of 2010-2011. Where sony is a bit behind some others is lenses, but rx1 is a great camera and all the nex and mirrorless alpha are great bodies, probably the best on the market.
> no vignetting
Should be: much less vignetting.
One can’t eliminate vignetting completely from the optical design of the lenses.
> Sony said it’s very difficult to design zoom lenses for it.
I wonder why. Flat sensor with microlenses has it much worse.
>One can’t eliminate vignetting completely
It’s quite possible.
You can design lens that is free of mechanical vignetting, but to get rid of the angular light loss you need to use telecentric lens design (like photolithography lenses or some microscopes) what is not really possible with photographic lenses. The curved sensor design may indeed improve on the vignetting, but it is not probable it can be removed completely.
you’re inventing/citing urban legends…
just making lens telecentric lessens vignetting but nor removes it neither required to.
vignetting might be removed completely, but because very few applications need it, it’s not implemented
As you change the focal lens on the zoom lens the lens groups (2 or more) are moving in a complicated way and the angle under which the light reaches the sensor varies and also the plane of focus will tend to change its curvature. Flat sensor means that the effective radius of wavefront (and therefore the image plane) is infinite. But with curved sensor it is not and apparently it is hard to design a zoom lens where this curvature of the field can be held constant over the zoom range.
I have to admit I am curios to what extend these curved sensor will find their place in digital cameras.
I think, they would have more potential in mobile cameras. Theoretically, it should be easier to make a “curved” sensor of smaller size. With larger size, it would be much harder to maintain the consistent curve from sensor to sensor. But the way the announcement was worded, I have impression that Sony eyes the high-end large sensor market first.
In my opinion, that sensor will totally rule the entire camera sensor especially mirrorless camera. Why? Base on the informations…
1. That sensor will allow the camera to have better corner image quality like medium format camera trying to do such as big flange back. With that sensor, even the med format does not need make the big flange back.
2. More smaller lens than before. which means, the size of Sony FE 24-70 f4 can be made into FE24-70 f2.8 with almost same size.
3. One of the developer told that the noize is almost equal to Sony A7S.