Nikon reveals a lens that captures wide and telephoto images simultaneously

Despite a number of what look like copy paste articles, I see no actual pictures of what the pictures taken look like. Maybe we'll see at CES but until then these feel like clickbait.

Neither the article nor official link gave much optical design detail. Here&#x27;s my guess. A (substantially) radially symmetric system comprising a wide-angle positive-short-focal-length first lens followed closely by a negative-short-focal-length whose diameter is small (thus covering a small range of angles, in the center field of view, from the first lens). A single central sensor behind the negative element is for telephoto images, while a collection of sensors distributed radially around the first lens and off axis capture wide angle images.<p>Imagine a low-index ball lens in contact with a thin high-index negative lens. That&#x27;s the idea. I&#x27;m sure the real design uses multiple surfaces&#x2F;elements for each lens, and I&#x27;m sure it&#x27;s hyper-optimized. I&#x27;m interested to learn how close my guess is to reality.<p>Apologies for the complex wording to describe geometry.

On an only slightly related note, I&#x27;d be happy if the same was available on smartphones, <i>in software</i>: my mobile photography is of the school &quot;take a lot and discard almost as many&quot; and having to choose between the different lens&#x2F;sensor pairs ahead of snap is entirely alien to that process. So the camera software is forever set to that main lense and all the other ones are just dead weight in my pocket (and stuff manufacturers don&#x27;t allow me to not buy when I need a new phone, preferably one with a good main camera)<p>I think I understand that the precessor would not be able to read out the sensors at the same time, but time-multiplexed bracketing has been done before, it really should not be too hard or weird to apply that concept to multiple sensors? (some sensors with integrated memory might even be able to do concurrent capture&#x2F;deferred readout?)

A picture is worth a thousand words. Yet, in an article about a camera lens, there isn&#x27;t a single picture from it.

Not sure what the policies are on banning sites, but can this website please be banned?<p>I&#x27;m on mobile, this website has deceptive hitboxes so &quot;dismiss&quot; on the notifications prompt will almost hit the advert on the bottom. Once I finally managed to read the article and hit the bottom of the page, it had a popup which hijacked navigation so I couldn&#x27;t easily return to HN.<p>Will record this behavior if asked.<p>That said... There&#x27;s not much to say about this? Is it using &quot;meta&quot; lenses printed on silicon? Wish the article would have had any information whatsoever. I suppose we&#x27;ll learn more at CES. :P

I am guessing it is some sort of anamorphic lens that has the center portion telephoto and then smears out the wide angle around the edges of the sensor. So you need a translation algorithm to get back to a normal image.

I&#x27;m guessing it&#x27;s a beam splitting prism with 2 paths, one for wide angle, and the other for telephoto. They used to make cameras with 3 ccds for color video.

So it&#x27;s a fisheye lens?<p>If you plot pixels per degree over the field of view of a fisheye lens you will see that vastly more pixels are dedicated to the center &quot;eye&quot;. And also the field of view is large. Which is what this novel lens claims to also do.

nit: All wide lenses also capture a &quot;telephoto&quot; image in the center. The only thing a telephoto lens does is to spread that image out over the whole sensor.<p>Maybe their lens is variable focal length, providing more magnification in the center at a presumed cost of clarity.

It must be a lens that smoothly varies focal length depending on the distance from the center. You want pedestrians and bikes on the vicinity, as wide angle as possible and cars far away for emergency braking and ACC in the center of the image when going straight on a highway.

Like many here, my first thought was &quot;telephoto is just a crop of a wide-angle, so what are they bragging about?&quot; Here&#x27;s my speculation:<p>Most lenses are &quot;distortion corrected&quot; because they assume they will be displayed on a flat surface. A little explanation for those not familiar: When you take a picture of a brick wall with your camera parallel to the wall, notice that the bricks on the edge of the photo are the same size as the ones in the center, even though the edge bricks are further away from the camera. This means more pixels are allocated per degree of view near the edge of the field-of-view than at the center.<p>An &quot;uncorrected&quot; lens is basically what we would call a &quot;fish-eye&quot; lens. Here (ideally) the same number of pixels are in a one-degree circle in the center of the field-of-view as are in a one-degree circle near the edge.<p>I don&#x27;t think they would crow about just using an &quot;uncorrected&quot; lens either, so I&#x27;m going to guess that this is a &quot;reverse-corrected&quot; lens system where a one-degree circle in the center gets <i>more</i> pixels than it would at the edge. This would be the obvious approach if they want a good center crop but want to capture all the periphery as well.

I’m imaging a variable focal length across the image plane, decreasing as the distance to the centre increases.

I imagine it taking pictures like this:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.escherinhetpaleis.nl&#x2F;escher-today&#x2F;balcony&#x2F;?lang=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.escherinhetpaleis.nl&#x2F;escher-today&#x2F;balcony&#x2F;?lang=...</a>

It’s nice to see innovation in optics yet I think it&#x27;s more for niche scenarios like sports

Couldn’t find the article inside this ad collection.

This has no future with 200mpx sensors becoming common.

Let me guess, it&#x27;s going to be &quot;AI assisted&quot;