Cell phone designers strive for sleekness, a quality that makes it nearly impossible to include a quality zoom lens on your phone. The thin, wide-angle lenses found in today's phones work fine for panoramic shots, but forget about crisp close-ups.


The reflective rings on this crystal increase the optic's focal length to enable high-quality zoom.

To zoom in, cell phone cams simply stretch pixels, which kills image quality.

Now researchers at the University of California at San Diego have borrowed a mirror trick from reflective-telescope makers to cram sharp telephoto capability into a package just a few millimeters thick.

The technique uses mirrors to bounce light back and forth, lengthening the path light travels (which increases the potential for magnification) without bulking up the length of the optic.

To make the lens, engineering professor Joseph Ford and graduate student Eric Tremblay carved an array of concentric reflective rings into a single optical crystal, creating a miniature hall of mirrors.

When light enters the camera's aperture, it bounces from ring to ring and eventually lands on a central sensor that interprets the information and produces close-up telephoto images on your screen.

The new optic is seven times as thin as a traditional, 35-millimeter refractive lens, with nearly equivalent image quality.

The researchers have applied for a patent on the technology and are working on a version of the optic that's one fifth the current size -- which could be good news for your camera phone in a couple years.


http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/ptech/08/01/o...tics/index.html

Hmm.. Anyway any of your guys really use the phone camera functions for taking pictures or any serious photos that you would develop or keep in backup? The only time I've used the phone camera function is to capture the bend on my car when I got into an accident, so that I could use that evidence to claim from his insurance company. jk