Jon Stern

It's Fusion. GoPro's new spherical capture camera.

https://www.wired.com/story/gopro-fusion-360-hands-on/

@Enginel, polarization is not easy to achieve at the pixel level. It is an area of research though.

It's difficult to do better than the standard Bayer pattern. Attempts to do so have rarely gone...

@Airydiscus, With microlens shift, the sensor roll off with CRA is mitigated. I won't tell you specific numbers as I'm covered by a NDA by my last employer (a CMOS image sensor manufacturer), but...

@AiryDiscus, I'm not quite sure what you mean.

For a start vignetting isn't the same as RI. Vignetting really means something blocking light rays (whether chief, or marginal rays). Whereas,...

@Enginel, details? I'm not sure how I can give more details on the absence of a curved sensor in the product.

If you are wondering why we tore it down, I was working for a rival image sensor...

@Josh Leavitt, partner with Sony? No!

Semiconductors Components Industries is the legal name of ON Semiconductor. They bought Aptina (where I worked), a rival CMOS image sensor manufacturer to Sony.

@Josh Leavitt, wafer thinning is used for back-side illuminated sensors. In that case the sensor wafer is bonded to a mechanical support wafer, or in the case of new stacked die sensors, to an ASIC...

Alberto, you seem to be assuming that lenses always achieve the best case relative illumination (RI) set by the cos^4 law. This is not the case.

Maybe high-end SLR lenses get close, but for many...

Sony did not release a camera with a curved sensor. There were reports that the DSC-KW1/KW11 "perfume bottle" camera used one, but when we tore one down at my last company, the sensor was flat.

Josh Leavitt, silicon becomes quite flexible when thinned down to below a few tens of microns thick. That kind of thinness is used today for stacked memories (like in micro SD cards)

HowaboutRAW,...

Not necessarily. Having worked on curved image sensors and being a co-author of a patent...

A lens designed for a curved sensor can deliver higher RI (less shading) while holding the other specs constant, than a lens designed for a flat sensor.

Equally, higher corner MTF can be achieved...

Nasty jello effect going on there.

It also looks like the there was a lot of noise in the video that's then been smudged by the compression.

Beautiful scenery though!

Don't look at it using a mobile browser (well, at least Safari on iOS). If you use a desktop browser you get the correct VR Youtube playback that allows you to pan around.

Don't look at it using a mobile browser (well, at least Safari on iOS). If you use a desktop browser you get the correct VR Youtube playback that allows you to pan around.

We had the same debate at work (in our Optical Systems Group) a couple of months ago. We ended up using this as our reference:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OR8HSHevQTM

@Teila Day, oh no! This is not the aftermath of automation. This is just the beginning. AI and improving robots will supplant more and more jobs.

Professional drivers? Gone in 10-20 years.
Pilots?...

@Dr_Jon, thanks for those links (I'm Dr Jon too!).

This answers several questions I have. It also tells me that this technology is only going to work for relatively large (low SAG) elements due to...

Yes, but those compromises seem to be acceptable for some customers and use cases. Is it that demand is weak, or that they are expensive to develop?

@Teila Day, the study was from 1995 to 2015, I think. I understand what the anecdotal evidence suggest, and I myself have spent a lot of time in China working with manufacturers there.

However, a...