varioptic
Latest
Varioptic liquid lenses now shipping in SnakeCam webcam
We've been hearing about how Varioptic's liquid camera lenses would revolutionize cellphones for a while now, so it's a little bit surprising to see the oil-and-water optics pop up in Akkord Electronics' el cheapo SnakeCam webcams first. The 1.3 megapixel S1300 and 2.0 megapixel S2000 cams feature a Varioptic Arctic 416 lens, as well as bendy mount, built-in microphone, and CMOS sensor, and will sell for just $20 per unit -- but we'd imagine that whoever ends up rebranding these will mark that up a bit.
Varioptic and Seiko to start manufacturing liquid camera lenses
Could it be that liquid lenses for cellphone cameras are finally about to go from promising-but-undelivered tech to the real thing? We're not holding out hope -- they didn't rock the world when they popped up in a couple nondescript Samsung phones before -- but Varioptic and Seiko have just announced a deal to crank out 500,000 of the goopy buggers a month starting in Q3. It's not clear exactly what cellphones these are going to turn up in, apart from being targeted at 5 megapixel camera modules that require continuous auto-focus in video mode.[Via Phone Scoop]
German researchers create zooming liquid lenses
Liquid lenses have been kicking around as the Next Big Thing for a while, but outside of cameo appearances in a couple Samsung cellphones, they haven't exactly made waves in the market. That may be in part due to the fact that they can be made smaller and cheaper than conventional optics, but haven't been able to provide zoom or particularly high resolution. All that might be changing, however, as a Fraunhofer Institute team working in conjunction with French firm Varioptic has developed a system of 4 liquid lenses that can snap from 1 - 2.5x magnification at the touch of a button. The system isn't quite ready for primetime yet -- exposure times are still a little long, it can't zoom continuously, and the assembly is a little big at 29mm -- but the team is already considering solutions to those problems and is ready to go to the prototype stage. With all the interest from cellphone manufacturers, we'll bet they solve those problems right quick.
