A Camera Lens Breakthrough Could See Smartphones Outperforming DSLRs

If you ’ve ever held a high - timbre tv camera lense , the first thing you notice is the free weight . Thanks to layers and stratum of thick glass hunks inside , they terminate up being very weighty . However , thanks toresearch being done at Harvard on something called metalenses , one twenty-four hours those mgiant Methedrine - meet lens system might be disused .

The curving surfaces on a glass electron lens focalise incoming Inner Light onto a camera ’s digital detector . The more precise ( and expensive ) the lens is , the better the image it will give rise .

Metalenses influence in a standardised way , but they ’re not made of precision - ground methamphetamine . alternatively , a layer of transparent quartz is completely cover in a layer of tiny column made from titanium dioxide . When coiffe in specific pattern , those complex tower arrays can centre light precisely like a glass lens does . Except that these tiny metalenses terminate up being thin than a human hair , and consider almost nothing .

Sounds like a engineering that only a well - funded organization like the US military would be able to open , good ? Turns out that ’s not the case . The reason gargantuan television camera lenses end up being so expensive is that the manufacturing process requires the deoxyephedrine to be utterly craunch and polished to incredibly accurate tolerances — which slows down the aggregated production mental process .

Thanks to years of refining the manufacturing processes for electronics , bring forth these metalenses will be relatively easy and cheap using the same techniques used for microchips . The other huge advantage is that these lenses wo n’t have to be the size of Pringles cans . Once the technology is perfected , the same lens used in a DSLR could be rack into a smartphone . They say the best camera is the one you have with you , but soon your smartphone might really be as good as it gets .

[ Science AAASviaPetaPixel ]

Argentina’s President Javier Milei (left) and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., holding a chainsaw in a photo posted to Kennedy’s X account on May 27. 2025.