New Lens Technology Could Bring Optical Zoom to Even the Thinnest Smartphones by 2016

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Smartphone cameras have improved exponentially since their introduction to the world, but one company still believes there’s plenty of room for improvement. That company is DynaOptics and their latest tech is promising to pack optical zoom into more smartphones without adding any bulk to the phones at all.

Mostly due to physical limitations (read: bulky optics), few smartphones have featured optical zoom camera systems. As phones get thinner and thinner, protruding lenses on phones aren’t exactly… popular… and so the optics suffer for the sake of portability and design.

However, DynaOptics recently unveiled a new optical zoom lens design at StartX that promises to give us the best of both worlds.

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DynaOptics’ solution will rid us of the bulk-for-zoom trade-off by using asymmetrical lenses. Basically, rather than moving in-and-out to zoom, as most conventional optical zoom setups do, these lenses can simply slide up, down, left and right.

As the infographic above shows, they’re able to recreate the same optical effect without requiring that a lens element move forwards and backwards.

The startup has already raised $2 million to date and is looking for more to further study how to miniaturize optical zoom for mobile devices. While only prototypes were brought to the StartX event, DynaOptics says they will have engineering samples available for smartphone manufacturers within the first quarter of 2015 and plan to be mass producing this tech by the end of 2015.

(via Image Sensors World)

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