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The world’s smallest silicon LED could turn your phone into a high-power microscope

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Researchers at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) have developed a new silicon Light Emitting Diode (LED) and holographic microscope which between them could help turn your smartphone into a powerful, high-resolution microscope. Together they are both the world’s smallest LED and the world’s smallest holographic microscope.

This LED, they say, is comparable in output to much larger silicone LEDs. But, by “much larger”, we’re not talking huge. Remember, this is the world’s smallest silicon LED and it’s very small indeed. Smaller than the wavelength of light itself.

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Canon has a new 19-megapixel global shutter full-frame CMOS sensor to be released in 2023

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Canon has announced that they’ve developed a 19-megapixel global shutter full-frame CMOS sensor. There are four different models of the same LI5030S sensor in colour, black and white, colour/near-infrared and full spectrum, all capable of shooting full resolution at up to 58 frames per second. Canon says that the new sensor will be ready to go on sale in January 2023.

But don’t get too getting too excited just yet. It looks like we probably won’t be seeing this come in an EOS R mirrorless camera. At least, not anytime soon. At the moment, it appears that this sensor is targeted more towards scientific and industrial use, rather than photographic. Use cases where being able to see full unwarped and undistorted images shot in rapid succession is often mission-critical.

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This 360° amphibious camera takes its optical design from the eyes of fiddler crabs

One of the big problems you encounter when moving a camera from dry land to under the water is the difference in the index of refraction (IOR). That’s the thing that often makes rivers and lakes appear much shallower than they actually are when you’re looking at them from the water’s edge. For 360° cameras, this difference in IOR can be a big problem when it comes to shifting from the air to underwater.

A team of researchers at the Institute for Basic Science (IBS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST), the Seoul National University and The University of Texas at Austin, though, have developed a system based on one of nature’s designs. They’ve taken inspiration from the fiddler crab to develop a 360° camera system that works both in and out of the water.

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Glass wants to make all smartphone lenses anamorphic – but probably not the way you think

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Glass, a new startup working on AI-enhanced imaging, wants to change how our smartphone cameras work to overcome the limitations of current smartphone cameras. They want to do it using larger, wider sensors and the same technology found anamorphic lenses in order to be able to do it. The problem, essentially, is that size matters. And smartphone cameras are running out of space to expand.

You can’t make the sensors larger without making the lenses larger (longer) and phones just aren’t that thick anymore. AI is great and has brought us a lot of advances in smartphone imaging technology over the last few years but that, too, only goes so far. Glass’ solution is to use the 100-year-old cinema technology to overcome some of those size limitations.

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German researchers develop a sensor that’s near-impossible to blow highlights with

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Researchers at the Institut für Mikroelektronik Stuttgart in Germany, have developed an image sensor that makes it virtually impossible to blow your highlights. It uses “self-resetting pixels” which when they get saturated don’t clip. It simply starts counting over, keeping track of the number of times it’s started over.

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LumiWatch is a projector smartwatch that turns your arm into a really bad touchscreen

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The idea of a smartwatch that could project a “screen” onto your arm with an interactive touch UI has been around for a while. But up until now, they’ve all either been vapourware or concepts. Now, though, it seems to be a reality, in the form of the LumiWatch, developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University. Although, it doesn’t actually look very good. In fact, it looks quite terrible.

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NASA’s new camera tech explores the Earth’s underwater world from air

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“We know more about the surface of Mars and Moon combined than we do of our own ocean floor.” Thanks to Ved Chirayath of NASA Ames Research Center, this might change in near future. He has developed a new camera tech that allows the scientists to explore the ocean floor from the air. This hardware and software technique is named fluid lensing, and it could enable NASA to look and map out all of the coastal ocean systems in the world.

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Why Self Driving Cars Will Never Fly

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Like many photographers and film makers I have a drone in my gear closet – a DJI Mavic to be precise.

Every time I take it up for a spin I’m amazed at how ridiculously sophisticated this little machine is. It’s so easy to fly my 8 year old can do it with ease. It has all kinds of fail-safe features built in. It will even help you out and land itself if something goes wrong.

Except things do go wrong.

Which reminds me of self driving cars, because a lot of the technology and functionality that goes into a drone is like a prequel to what we can expect from self driving cars – both the good and the bad.

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Polaroid SX-70 vs Canon Rebel T5 (1200D) – the state of camera technology

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I like shooting with older, more limited cameras. There’s less for me to think about, it’s more relaxing. I get more selective in my shots when it costs money every time I hit the shutter. But it does make you think just how far the cameras in our hands have changed today from what they were in film’s heyday. What users expect of their cameras has also changed to keep up with technology, too.

This video from Wired takes a look inside the Polaroid SX-70, an extremely popular camera in its day, and a somewhat more modern Canon EOS 1200D (Rebel T5). Everything from the basic ergonomics of the camera itself to advanced technical features are compared in this 90 second short.

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