New Fuji camera creates new laws of physics

There is a new four page ad for the Fuji E1 digital camera appearing in photo
magazines this month.
It shows a pair of ray tracing diagrams comparing the "old" way light
transverses a lens with the "new" way invented by Fuji.
The new way light leaving the lens has all the rays parallel so that they strike
the sensor at 90 degrees. There is no divergence as the rays approach the
corners. The old way light spreads out as it leaves the lens.

The only way light emerges parallel from a lens is if the subject is at the
focal point.
Perhaps the new Fuji only takes pictures at one (very short) distance?

If they want to claim something about their lens design (less vignetting,
perhaps), why not say that instead of making up phony lens diagrams.

 

Marketing and advertising people don't always check their ideas with the
technical people in the company - the ones who know.

 

Fuji is also the inventor of the 3 megapixel camera that produces a 6
megapixel file. They are obviously so far in advance of the rest of the
world that mere physics cannot stand in their way.

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The only type of light I know with (nearly) parallel rays is called a laser.
Sometimes known as collimated light.

 

Ever heard of sun light? As near to parallel as makes no difference in most
situations.

collimated light is not a laser.

A laser produces light in which the photos are in phse with each other. That
remains true even if the beam is spread so that the paths are no longer
parallel.

Luke

 

No doubt the marketers screwed this up slightly, I havn't seen the advert
but this sounds very like a kind of field flattener. These lenses are added
to telescopes to improve sharpness at the edge of an image when taking
photographs.

They work by increasing the angle at which light strikes the sensor (CCD or
film) towards the edge of the image to reduce bluring.

If I recall my astronomy lectures correctly the focal length on some of
these lens varies along the radius so your standard optical equations are
not going to give you much insight into their functioning.

I guess fuji have come up with some way of making this useful in a compact
camera but I doubt its going to revolutionise photography.

Luke

 

eDigital Photo shows the Olympus E1 SLR showing light rays
impacting the CCD in parallel. Is this it?
Gene Gene http://www.photoprojects.net

 

Collimated light doesn't require a laser, in fact there have been
optical benches using collimated light long before lasers were invented.
You are confusing coherence with collimation.

 

Collimation is a property of *some ways of generating laser light* and
even then it's not perfect collimation. Since most laser profiles are
gaussian anyway, the ray-optics concept of collimation is one of these
kindegarten (or undergraduate) lies-to-children.

B>

 

Physics is the study of frictionless elephants whose masses may be ignored.

David J. Littleboy
Tokyo, Japan

 

Collimated light doesn't require a laser, in fact there have been
optical benches using collimated light long before lasers were invented.
You are confusing coherence with collimation.[/QUOTE]

The other way to get collimated light is to throw away the uncollimated
parts. I.e., use a very small aperture. Not always the most convenient
for action photography...

 

It's because the forces of goodness and light have kept them at bay. Any
system that's been up and running crash free for over twelve billion
years is just fine the way it is.




mike

 

The other way to get collimated light is to throw away the uncollimated
parts. I.e., use a very small aperture. Not always the most convenient
for action photography...[/QUOTE]

It can be argued that this really doesn't do what you think it does,
thanks to the magic of diffraction and image formation.

If you took a lens a put some sort of infinitely narrow perfectly
absorbing honeycomb-type mesh (that was quite deep) behind it, then
you'd get (very little) collimated light. Pinholes just won't do it.

B>

 

But at least they're only hypothetical elephants.

B>

 

there are perfectly feasable ways of making well enough colimated light for
most practical purposes. Indeed youcould use tube witha mirror at one end
and a very slightly transmissive mirrored surface at the other end.

You can put a normal light in there and you have made a collimated source in
just the same way a laser is made collimated the only difference is you
haven't made the light coherant.

Luke

 

Coherent light.

 

"Assume a spherical elephant of uniform density..."

D

 

It can be argued that this really doesn't do what you think it does,
thanks to the magic of diffraction and image formation.[/QUOTE]

Yes, I severely oversimplified. Thanks for the clarification.

The point I was trying to make was the "(very little)". You need more
than a pinhole in your device, but the amount of light you get is
similarly small to a pinhole.

 

There is no physics problem. Anyone can add pixels. The trick would be to
add resolution, and their ads seem to claim they do.

For years, Fuji has struggled to get ahead of Kodak, instead of copying
them. Tilting the sensor 45 degrees is at least a novelty.

 

Actually, there *is* a lens design that does this - it's called
telecentric. The idea is to put a stop in an appropriate place inside
the lens so that light reaching a particular portion of the image only
uses the part of the lens rear element which is directly (or almost
directly) above that place on the focal plane.

It's not magic, but it's also not what you want in most circumstances.
It means the lens has to be physically larger than the image format, and
it also wastes a lot of light (the f-number will be rather large).

I've read about a telecentric lens being used on an optical printer (for
film special effects). This would allow the operator to adjust image
focus without changing image size at the same time. It's also used in
making measurements: you can get telecentric loupes for measuring stuff.

Dave