United States Application US20100277923 discloses a new liquid lens technology developed by Sony (Source: Freepatentsonline). With such technology you can change the curvature of the lens by changing the voltage of the liquid. The advantages are:
-non-movement glasses for zoom or AF
-less glasses inside the lens
-faster electrical response
-non-motor on the glass
-silence AF mode
It might will pass a long time before we see such a lens, but now you know what Sony is working on!
25 Responses
hydraulic lens?
The downside? How about changing viscosity of the liquid under cold conditions? At what temperature does it freeze? Also will the lens be more fragile? All of these are variables that Sony will have to minimize. It will be years, if ever, before we see lenses using this technology.
Sony, bravo!
But
How about the down side of this technology?
WTF?! NICE!!!
heard that Samsung is developing the same kind of lens, right?
http://www.gizmag.com/samsung-liquid-zoom-lens-plans/16851/
I wonder how long such lens would preserve it’s optical quality? 10 years? 5 years? 2 years? a year? Cause I have perfectly working & sharp 20 year old lens which look almost like new. :eyeroll:
And this is what will sit on NEX-XX in some years from now.. 🙂
More likely this is for camera modules for cellphones where small physical size is probably more important than image quality.
Interesting. And if this isn’t a technological dead-end then I’d guesstimate it to be about a decade away far from market.
The real news here is the heavy R&D investment into LENSES. Lens resolution is the weak spot, across the whole industry.
well optics have been around since the days of Galileo (1642) and unless they use some strange new technology I wouldn’t expect a quantum leap…:-)
Optics is tough, but they do have leaps sometimes. Otherwise we can’t have 11nm processors! They have to start trying somewhere, better than giving up early.
I’m a computer architect, and we always hope that new optical technologies come to help push the boundaries to create smaller and smaller transistors :\
Why would optics help transistor manufacturing?
Transistor manufacturing is very much about optics. You create mask from the layout of the circuits, and these masks are then projected on the wafer.
This projection is optics to it’s most extreme, because the feature size of modern CMOS processes is smaller than the wavelength of visible light.
Perhaps Sony will implement an electronic aperture in certain lenses…
Perfectly circular aperture from wide open to pinhole with speed far beyond the current Minlota/Sony 5.6 FPS AE aperture bottleneck.
Could also be used for filters with varying degrees of translucence,color,vignetting. STF?
Not sure this is the right answer to Tom Hogan claims about high resolution lens need for Sony mount. For sure Sony will not feel lens with cola, but I also doubt that IQ of liquids could be better than for optical glass.
Not withstanding that fact that glass is in fact a liquid – just a very, very viscous one.
or not depending on the science you choose to go with
There is actually a startup from ETH Zurich which started commercializing such lenses:
http://www.optotune.com/
This reminds me a lot of the lens technology used in the Sony Ericsson K750i cell phone I bought back in 2005. Its camera lens had no moving parts and mimics the eye.
Here is an article on one kind of liquid lenses from 2004.
Esta tecnologia ya existe, la verdad esta en la mayoria de los celulares que tenemos, si me preguntan a mi. Yo no veo estos lentes en una relfex
I read something about this in an article in a gadget magazine in 2003. It’s been awhile but it’s good to hear about it again.
I look forward to the day I will be able to drink my own lenses.
Sony must be developing an underwater camera!
Ed, having a liquid based lens does not mean it has to be an underwater camera/lens of sort. you wont be seeing liquid flowing around the lens for that matter, as it will be inside under containment.
IMHO, liquid lenses are not impossible, but its physical size will be its limiting factor. Using the meniscus effect, we can already have a concave/convex surface depending on what liquid is being used. I say that the physical size being its stone wall, whereby with large sizes, more ‘liquid’ is needed to fill the space, which equates to more ‘ripples’ to form in the liquid during any movement. those are just my opinion anyway..
Another benefits of using liquid lens is individual lens group/elements can micro-adjust themselves on all zoom range to provide optimum sharpness and possible elimination on CA and distortion.
Good concept and hopefully it can be implemented in a few years time. =D
Being an optical designer, yes, they exist, no, you won’t see in in your next (or probably any) SRL lens. They are for very small form factor lenses. It’s an incredible tool for a designer to have variable curvature as part of the design! (As per the Samsung two-element zoom mentioned above.)