On Tue, Apr 05, 2011 at 08:13:58AM -0400, Bruce Walker wrote: > > If *all* the information available from the light was recorded by > the sensor, you could do away with the lens entirely. You could > simply expose the sensor through the empty lens mount and recreate > the scene later with digital signal processing. (I read of some > recent research work to do just that.)
I've seen a presentation on it by the people doing the research. Well, they still use a primary lens, but the sensor does all sorts of other things with microlenses, etc. It's moderately impressive. But there's a tradeoff; there are only so many bits of information you can capture on any sensor. If you are using some of them to be able to recreate images in post processing, you have to give up something in exchange. You can recreate some of the 'lost' information (much as is done nowadays with Bayer sensor arrays), but not all of it. And you're still limited to what comes in through the front element. So while you can get some amount of distance and 3-D information to allow a shift of viewpoint by seeing what is different from one side of the lens to the other, you obviously can't record information on anything that is totally obscured by something between it and the camera. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
