California startup Pelican Imaging wants to put slimmer, higher-quality cameras into cellphones with its new camera-array technology. Instead of using a single lens and sensor, the camera uses an array of smaller modules and uses computation to combine them into a single image. The resulting hardware is thin, but that is probably the least interesting thing about it.
The Pelican array uses “light-field photography”, and aside from just stitching small pictures into a big one, it does some things a regular camera can’t. For instance, you can diddle with the picture after it is taken, blurring a background, say. And in principle at least, you could use a kind of 3D “healing brush” to paint out distractions behind and in front of your subject.
Pelican’s camera also promises to give high resolution images with low-noise results in low-light situations, and could enable gesture-controls on tablets.
The tech is being sold into the industry, not to consumers, so we’ll keep our fingers crossed that Apple will buy this and use it to replace the crappy camera in its skinny iPod Touch.
Pelican Imaging Unveils Revolutionary Approach to Smartphone Cameras [Pelican via GigaOM]
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