Sony Curved FF Sensor

[flavio81]

A curved sensor will substantially simplify lens design.

This will allow for small, high performance lenses at competitive prices.

However, legacy lenses will NOT work (on a curved sensor body) as they are designed to focus on a flat plane (rather than a spherical surface).

Exactly.

Actually a spherical sensor would be best.

 

[fdarnell]

Film has an angular sensitivity function referred to as "cosine response". This is typically a response factor of 1 at 0 degrees angle of incidence and 0 at 90 degree angle of incidence. Digital sensors have a very narrow cosine response, so curving the edges of the sensor in this case will reduce the angle of incidence and therefore improve sensitivity. Vignetting is an example of cosine response. Wide angle lenses with short back element to film distances have very high angles of incidence to the film plane in the corners.

Long story short, this should be a major improvement for older glass lenses that basically project their images on a spherical surface, but "got away with it" since film's cosine response is much better than digital sensors.

I also believe this is indicative of the "flattening" that people see with modern lenses versus old glass. I for one ascribe to the theory - it's subtle, but there, particularly at wide apertures. Remember your eye's sensor is on the back of a sphere, not a flat plane.

It'll be expensive, but probably worth it. Time will tell.

One thing's for sure, technology advances, which is sometimes good to see, when it's put to constructive use.

 

[phofseth]

The issue raised above; ho[FONT=&quot]w to convert a sphere to a flat plane remains and gets [/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]worse the larger portion of the sphere you have to flatten. If in doubt, look at an ordinary Mercator projected map of Europe and Africa and compare the size of the southern continent [/FONT][FONT=&quot][FONT=&quot]w[/FONT]ith the size of Greenland. Then look up data on their real surface.

p.[/FONT]

 

[sevo]

The issue raised above; how to convert a sphere to a flat plane remains and gets
worse the larger portion of the sphere you have to flatten. If in doubt, look at an ordinary Mercator projected map of Europe and Africa and compare the size of the southern continent with the size of Greenland. Then look up data on their real surface.

p.

Yes and no. To avoid PROJECTION issues, the final medium (print, monitor or whatever) would have to spherical - the intermediary (sensor or film) can be any shape.

 

[phofseth]

Yes, two different issues here :

Lenses that are allowed to project their image on a sperical surface can have an easier time if designed to do so. Here the intermediary matters.

If the final output is organized so as to be printed on the inside of a goldfish bowl or on slightly spherical paper for slightly spherical picture frames, no problem in going from a surface sensor forming part of a sphere to the desired final result.

Projecting anyhing curved, spherical or simply a plane (at an angle) onto a flat surface entails distortion. Mercator is just one (very ancient) way of projecting a sphere onto a flat map. Any correction will need to add, "enlarge" or delete, "diminish" pixels. Expensive lens-by-lens correction will be replaced by a cheap once-and-for all program for all instances of that lens\sensor combo.
For a small solid angle piece of a sphere, the distortions will be correspondingly small.

A suitably crinkly and continuously malleable surface sensor might even correct for "moustache distortion" and adapt to lenses that change curvature of field with how their controls are set.

p.