The Next camera you buy

Have you bought a camera lately? If you bought a cell phone within the last eighteen months, you have almost certainly bought a camera too. Do you love it? Probably not. Even the best of the cell phone cameras (arguably the iPhone 4 camera right now) is far less versatile than a $150 camera from Walmart. The reason isn't cost or complexity - it's lens size. An optical zoom lens of 'interesting' quality is just too big to wedge into a sleek smartphone. We're left with a fixed field of view and mediocre sensitivity. It's a disappointment considering the hype! It turns out that your average 'good' pocket camera - I've recently been a fan of this Nikon - has about 10 optical 'elements' (lenses) to deliver fairly sharp images through a 10x zoom range. There are two general ways to get lots of versatility with fewer/smaller lens elements. Either you use variable focal elements such as liquid lenses ala Varioptic or you 'relax' your constraints on preserving nice flat images and allow more 'distortion' which you later remove digitally. It's the latter approach which pays greater dividends. By cooperatively designing optics with digital correction in mind, better end-point images can be achieved. Ultimately, smaller, cheaper, and simpler lenses can be used to achieve the results formerly requiring exotic and heavy lenses. Canon's S95 uses in-camera correction to deliver significant reduction in distortion over its zoom range. As the compute power to run these algorithms move downstream, cell phones with powerful optical zoom lenses should appear, with Japan as usual the harbinger for broader market growth.