Camera

Technology that allows an imaging sensor to lie on a curved surface rather than a flat plane has been developed by researchers at Northwestern University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Scientists say the development makes the lenses act more like a human eye and could someday work as part of an optical prosthetic.

Researchers have announced a technological development they say will improve the functionality of digital cameras and other imaging products. Yonggang Huang, a professor at Northwestern University, and John Rogers of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have created a lens they said was inspired by the human eye.

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A normal digital camera can take snaps of objects not directly visible to its lens, US researchers have shown. The “ghost imaging” technique could help satellites take snapshots through clouds or smoke.

Physicists have known for more than a decade that ghost imaging is possible. But, until now, experiments had only imaged the holes in stencil-like masks, which limited its potential applications.

Now Yanhua Shih of the University of Maryland, Baltimore, and colleagues at the US Army Research Laboratory, also in Maryland, have now taken the first ghost images of an opaque object - a toy soldier (see image, top right).

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Ruggedness is an advantage that sets professional SLRs above lesser models. The very affordable Pentax K10D erases that distinction, though. Pentax’s top D-SLR delivers pro-grade weatherproofing for hundreds, even thousands, of dollars less than other models with similar cladding. And none of those D-SLRs offers the K10D’s combination of image stabilization, automatic dust removal, and in-camera RAW “developing” made possible by a powerful new imaging engine.

Camera of the Year: Pentax K10D

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