{"id":22228,"date":"2021-12-15T01:07:54","date_gmt":"2021-12-15T05:07:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/?p=22228"},"modified":"2021-12-15T23:18:51","modified_gmt":"2021-12-16T03:18:51","slug":"take-it-with-a-grain-of-salt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/take-it-with-a-grain-of-salt\/","title":{"rendered":"taken with a grain of salt."},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

A digital camera the size of a grain of salt<\/p><\/div>\n

Toronto<\/strong>. Science seems to vacillate between analogue and digital concepts. The earliest radio receivers used digital – a “cat’s whisker” and a speck of solid state material.<\/p>\n

Significant improvement occurred when technology shifted to analogue – vacuum tubes – then later last century back to digital again.<\/p>\n

Similarly but on a much longer time scale, photography was initially analogue (films, glass plates, tintypes, daguerreotypes, salted paper) and then late last century and early this century, digital – with sensors getting smaller and denser raising both sensitivity and resolution.<\/p>\n

The earliest photographic lenses too were analogue creating a very tight bundle of light. Multiple lens elements of different glass types and curves corrected distortion and created a flatness of field. Microscope objectives used tiny lenses – the diameter falling as the magnification increased and the NA – numeric aperture – decreased. But always with a great many elements – even more than in a photographic lens, especially as objective magnification and NA both increased.<\/p>\n

Now (Monday, Nov 29, 2021) the Scientist Study<\/a> web site reports results by researchers\u00a0at Princeton University and the University of Washington<\/a> that demonstrates a camera and lens the size of a grain of salt. The key to the design was creating a lens that reacted to light in a digital fashion! The result infers much higher resolution and smaller physical size than earlier devices offered.<\/p>\n

The last colonoscopy I had, my surgeon offered a tiny camera in a pill capable of spotting a polyp about 5mm in size. Learning that the same pre-procedure cleansing process was used and any polyp discovered would need a colonoscopy anyway to remove it, I declined the pill since the cleansing was always the most onerous part of the procedure. Now a grain of salt size camera with higher resolution makes it time to reconsider ,,,,<\/p>\n

My thanks to my friend Russ Forfar, deep in the wilds of southwestern Ontario, for suggesting this post and offering the above links.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Toronto. Science seems to vacillate between analogue and digital concepts. The earliest radio receivers used digital – a “cat’s whisker” and a speck of solid state material. Significant improvement occurred when technology shifted to analogue – vacuum tubes – then … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[838,3974,3255,3502],"class_list":["post-22228","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-camera","tag-digital-camera","tag-digital-lens","tag-research","tag-university"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22228"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22228\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22236,"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22228\/revisions\/22236"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}