Rongnongno Loc: FL

Do away with it.

Engineers are working on many aspects from the form of each lens element to flatten the field of vision to curved sensor among other things...

Some progress has been made but not enough in my opinion.

The reason is simple there is no way to bend the light to fit neatly into the sensor's light elements, there is always something else going bad.

So what is the solution???

It is rather simple as a concept and likely a b**** to concretize...

Paint the sensor on the last element of a lens. That ways all the sensors elements are aligned with the light. The focusing is on that surface.

The lens basically becomes the camera.

Weird idea but...

Come to think of it, this would create incredible tools for underwater cameras... Assuming that air in the lens is replaced by a clear liquid. That would solve all the pressure issues and what comes with it, weight, bulk, ease of use, buoyancy ...

Scruples Loc: Brooklyn, New York

This is a novel idea. This also can explain why lenses cost a fortune. I don’t expect this to happen in my lifetime.

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

But isn't the focal point behind the last element on the lens?

How would you get the image data to the card?

Rongnongno Loc: FL

Not any more.

If you try to get a lens set for a parallax free stitching images you use the front lens...

PixelStan77 Loc: Vermont/Chicago

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kymarto Loc: Portland OR and Milan Italy

Impossible. The last element is part of the optical path to focus the image at some distance behind it. And even if you designed a lens where the image was focused at the rear surface, that actually increases the chance of aberrations since you take the last surface for corrections out of the optical formula. Aberrations are not magically introduced when the light leaves the last element, they are introduced as soon as the light is refracted by the front element. All the other elements are there to correct the problems introduced by a simple conveys lens.

MrPhotog

There are just a few problems with you design idea.

Glass bends light waves by a fixed angular amount. We seen that effect at the boundaries, where the glass ends and some other medium ( like air, oil, or a different type of glass) begins. The change in refraction between glass and air allows designing lighter lenses.

There have been magnifiers built like you propose. One side was flat and rested on the object, while the other side was rounded, or a conventional lens shape. These were cast plastic. They could have been made of glass, but they would have been outrageously expensive.

Turned around, they would have focused light at infinity onto their rear surface. The effective focal length would be about half the physical length, measured roughly from the middle of this large lens. ( actual length would vary based on refractive index of the glass used).

Since the front is a fixed distance from the back it would need to be ground to a curve that focused on the back. If it was ground to focus at 1 meter, it would focus Only at 1 meter. Adjustable focus would be impossible unless you could stretch the block of glass!

Weight. Weight. A big chunk of glass is heavy!

If the lens is solid glass you would need to deal with optical degradation from included bubbles.

If the lens is solid then you can’t include a moveable, adjustable, diaphragm to restrict light. Your only option here would be to set the aperture in front of the lens. This location introduces some optical problems.

While you can paint the outside of this large lens, you’ll still get some reflections from the inside edges. These will cause a loss of contrast at least, and internal flare and multiple spots from point sources of light. In conventional lenses these are controlled by paint and baffles in the air spaces, and the painted edges are rather thin.

If each lens is its own camera then you would not have interchangeable lens cameras. For pictures with a 50 mm lens you would pick up something roughly cylindrical and about 100mm long. Probably weigh about a pound. Your ‘picture’ would have a field of view of about 60 degrees and be a circular image with a diameter of about 50 mm.

Want to switch to a 200 mm lens? Your ‘camera’ would be the same shape, but enlarged in all dimension by a factor of 4. It would be 4 times as long, 4 times as wide, and 4 times as tall. The volume would be 64 times, and the weight would be about 64 pounds!

A 300 mm lens would weigh 6 x 6 x 6, or 216 pounds. I haven’t even a guess at how much it would cost to buy a solid chunk of good optical glass that big.

For all the cost and weight, the field of view would still be about 60 degrees, but the image size would be circles of about 8” or 12”.

If you could coat the rear element with an electronic material with a density of 2000 spots per inch you could get 4 megapixel resolution from each square inch. With a 50 mm lens that would be about 12 megapixels; with a 200 mm lens, about 48 megapixels; and with a 300 mm lens that would be about 144 megapixels. At least in theory.

You could reduce the weight and cost considerably by limiting the diameter to about 2”. If the circular image doesn't appeal to you, or suit the composition, it could be cropped to full frame 35 mm size
With about a 6 megapixel resolution.

If your technology allows you to get more than 4000 pixels per square inch then all these figures increase, of course.

Despite these limitations, your idea has some merit when included as just the final element of an optical system. The front element, or elements, would be constructed of glued or air-spaced elements as is conventionally done. Then, the back element could have a flat or curved surface covered with optical sensors.

In the extreme cases the back element is curved, or flat. If it is flat it is the same as a current flat sensor in the optical plane of focus.

If it is curved it is either spherical, and would match ( and negate) the spherical aberrations of other lens elements, or it is aspherical and serves the same purpose of reducing spherical aberrations. In either case, the curvature would best match only a single lens it was designed for. This would be an advantage mostly with very short focal length, wide angle lenses, but not so important with longer focal lengths.

Nice idea. Hasselblad had the SWC camera built with a non-interchangeable 38 mm wide angle lens. They had to deal with designing a lens to give a flat image as it was captured on flat film. The corners of the were farther from the center of the lens and thus received less light. If a similar camera could be built today using a digital image sensor built in a hemi-spherical shape it could use a simpler lens design (probably cheaper and lighter) and have even light coverage over the image area.

Maybe someone will build one.