Hacker News Reader

Comment by 07d046 | Hacker News Reader

The multi-aperture thing isn't what makes this interesting. What is interesting is that it takes a bunch of little sensors and combines them into a single better image with software.

Because a lot of work has been done into making very good sensors and optics for phones, this approach does make some sense. It also lets you have more sensor surface area without the bulky optics. I'm pretty sure that there are telescope arrays that work in a similar way.

I'm not about to replace my cameras with these, but it's got potential.

There's more information in http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/7/9473793/light-l16-16-lens-... and http://www.technologyreview.com/news/542121/a-high-end-camer... .

View on HN

The multi aperture thing doesn't make much sense, it appears to have multiple lenses which will have debilitating parallax error due to the positioning. I don't see how that's possible. I'm also struggling to see why they laid out the sensors in such a non geometric pattern too.

Parallax could be corrected by software as long as the subject isn't too close. You might lose a little detail around the edges but with enough redundancy it's probably not a big deal

In their examples there's a macro photo of a chess board.

If you look closely at that photo, the result is really weird. The black pieces behind the plane of focus have very uncertain positions that the software didn't bother fixing. It's bokeh, in a way. A horrible way.

Yup, it's not nice. Headache inducing.

Yeah, it does look a little funky around the edges of the pieces in the background, but surprisingly not the foreground: https://www.dropbox.com/s/o4rx62fjo63nvk4/Screenshot%202015-...

https://light.co/content/2-gallery/gallery_modal_05.jpg

You're right, that's like no lens blur I've ever seen.

Right. Also surprising how much fine noise there is in the background — it ‘should be’ out of focus enough there there would be nearly no noise at all…

It's a lot like an unsharp-mask halo though

I think that's just a zoomed up picture with low depth of field. I'm not a photographer so correct me if I'm wrong. The chess pieces in the background look still quite big compared to the pieces in the front. It suggests that the photo was taken from around 30-40 cm.

I wonder what the pixel density on these sensors is like.

Because even if you have a bunch of small sensors combined with software, they will still be noisy, and low light performance will be bad if they are standard small sensors

For instance, I wouldn't ditch my dSLR for this - http://light.co/content/2-gallery/gallery_modal_02.jpg

I don't see them competing with SLRs. You'll need a lot of small sensors to capture as much light as a one big SLR sensor.

However, it's impossible to put larger sensors in thin phones because of the size of the optics, so putting a few small sensors and doing magic in software is a way to overcome this. I can believe that we'll be seeing this technology coming to phones in the not to distant future.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com