I was thinking about lens design, prompted by reading about how 'superb' the new Nikon Z lenses are supposed to be. Aberrations, distortion, etc all designed out.
For recording an image on film, the lens has to be really good because it is the final image that is recorded on the film and there's not much that can be done to improve it afterwards (or is there, maybe nowadays?) - a reasonable assumption historically.
Things like vignetting could be corrected for in a manual enlarger, but not in automatic printing. Some distortion could be corrected too, but at big time expense. You could use different gamma paper of modify its developing to change contrast. There was no such thing as "sharpening" or "CA removal".
But recording onto electronic sensor(s) is surely a whole different game. Take chromatic aberration. Isn't this where the prism effect means a simple lens focusses different colours at different points on the image plane.
So how could you get round this? You could have three filtered sensor/lenses simultaneously recording say R G and B with slightly different simple-lens to sensor distances. Or maybe one simple-lens and sensor but move the lens slightly between exposures and combine later. And maybe circular sensors, look how carp the lens in the human eye is. Multiple sensors could be small and simpler to make, but combined to add up to high enough resolution counts.
Multiple sensors for RBG have been used a long time in video cameras. In hobby astronomy it is common to use a cooled black/white camera (chip without bayer mask) and then take multiple images with RGB and other filters mounted on a filter wheel in sequence. The images are then "stacked" in software to form a color picture. However, it is done for reasons other than correct for inferior lenses.
Or think of computerized medical imaging. We can make very high quality pictures without lenses and light, from x-ray and Gamma radiation, from magnetic resonance of Hydrogen (water) and many other nuclei like Carbon. We can even combine these pictures into one single image to guide surgeons in 3 dimensions or to precisely deliver the beam from a linear accelerator.
However, there is always a lot of expensive technology behind. Today it is so much cheaper to make a good lens in the first place, rather than to correct for its errors. The easier things like correcting geometrial distortion, to some extent CA, artificial bokeh etc can already be done today on the cheap.
So there must be a *fundamental* difference in the requirements of lens performance between film and digital that Smartphone cameras can exploit to get satisfactory images with cheaper, smaller, simpler recording hardware. Many photographers still use lenses designed for film cameras (and expect to be able to do so) and there seems to be a tacit acceptance that digital camera lenses should continue to be designed to interface with digital 'cameras' in the traditional way.
The possibilities are indeed endless. Think of a future smartphone that can also take pictures from invisible infrared or UV radiation.... or take a handheld CT scan from your skeleton...
One day one may even take virtual pictures, from a computer model of our world. Why go out to visit a scene... Think of google maps in 3d at a much much higher resolution. You want to take a sunrise at Sydney bridge from coordinates xyz, enter the time 06:13am, the focal length from your home lounge. Countless people have taken similar pictures before you, they are all on file.... or you may choose taking your pic of a scene on Jupiter. It will soon become boring and you will find yourself another hobby, of which there will be plenty.
So maybe smartphone camera design will achieve genuine parity with traditional camera design. After all there must be some really really 'clever b*ggers' working on it. Perhaps it's wrong to assume inherent inferiority in performance of the smartphone approach
I have no doubt about that. Question is, will I still be around, or will it already happen in the next 5 to 10 years. We live in a great time, probably the best time to be around. We can experience all these technology advances.... right before artificial intelligence is going tho first enslave humans then render us extinct.
Not "We're doomed....",
WE are doomed!
