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Zeiss's "Holocam" turns glass windows into cameras

digitalcameraworld.com

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Re: Zeiss's "Holocam" turns glass windows into cameras

#141

Post by bdavbdav »

Psychoshy_bc1q wrote: post #111
NavinF wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood bigger and more numerous camera bumps until I used optical zoom and took photos at night. Image quality with thick lenses is incomparably superior to that of thin lenses and 3 image sensors collect 3x as many photons as 1 so you don't have to hold the phone still for such a long time. Ideally the entire backside of my phone would be lenses

and your 1500€ phone still sucks compared to my 500€ DSLR, lol

Your 500€ DSLR isn’t a €300 phone, a €300 camera, a €300 navigation device, a €300 Sonos Remote, a €300 PDA all in one.

Re: Zeiss's "Holocam" turns glass windows into cameras

#142

Post by linux_is_nice »

jamiek88 wrote: post #136
Psychoshy_bc1q wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I regularly use my DSLR and print photos with my own canon photoprinter. i bought a 70mm-300mm lens for a bronyconvention (galacon) and it is simply impossible to get images of that quality with a phone. and the 50mm f1.8 is really great considering the low price.

Yes and I manually sort through thousands of sunflower seeds every year to get the good ones for my breeding program but our obscure hobbies aren’t the norm.

Now I want to know more about your sunflower breeding program :)

Re: Zeiss's "Holocam" turns glass windows into cameras

#143

Post by taejo »

shinycode wrote: post #126
jamiek88 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but I have my iPhone everywhere and the pictures the 15 pro max takes are beyond ‘good enough’. Even the zoom is pretty good nowadays. Often the choice isn’t iPhone photo or DSLR photo it’s iPhone or no photo at all. It’s a right faff getting the DSLR out and carrying it around. I brought mine to NYC over Xmas and ended up using my phone mostly. Also no one I know prints photos out, they look at them on their pho…

I tried to go on holidays with my dslr… what a pain. So heavy (unless you buy a $3000 mirrorless) for photos I never print and the times I print them no one ever take the time to look at them. They stay in a closet until thrown out. The quality from my iPhone is not that great as a 4K monitor wallpaper compared to my DSLR. But given the fact that it weights nothing and on holidays the iPhone allows me to text, use GP…

You're right about the strengths of the phone camera, and I also take many more pictures with it. But printing large prints, framing and hanging pictures is absolutely worth doing, much more than printing 4×5s to flip through. I love having them and everyone who comes into my home takes some time to look at them.

Re: Zeiss's "Holocam" turns glass windows into cameras

#144

Post by jdietrich »

Psychoshy_bc1q wrote: post #111
NavinF wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood bigger and more numerous camera bumps until I used optical zoom and took photos at night. Image quality with thick lenses is incomparably superior to that of thin lenses and 3 image sensors collect 3x as many photons as 1 so you don't have to hold the phone still for such a long time. Ideally the entire backside of my phone would be lenses

and your 1500€ phone still sucks compared to my 500€ DSLR, lol

For the everyday needs of the average non-enthusiast consumer, I'd argue that an iPhone is simply better than a DSLR or mirrorless - not just more portable or more convenient, but capable of producing reliably better images.

Sure, the DSLR is the obvious choice if you're a serious photographer, but most people aren't serious photographers. If they buy a DSLR or mirrorless camera, they're going to use the kit lens and leave the mode dial on auto. For people who just want to point and shoot, the iPhone's computational brilliance shines through.

The iPhone isn't so much a camera as a generative algorithm that happens to use image sensor data as a prompt. That's infuriating if you're a photographer who just wants full control over a big sensor, but it's tantamount to magic if you don't know what an f-stop is and have no inclination to learn.

I'd bet that if you gave my mother an iPhone and a DSLR, she'd get consistently better images from the iPhone, even if we gave her a one-day crash course on photography first. Sure, she might fluke the odd decent photo with the DSLR, but 90% of the time, the iPhone's algorithmic guesswork is going to beat better imaging hardware with dumber software.

Re: Zeiss's "Holocam" turns glass windows into cameras

#145

Post by digging »

Psychoshy_bc1q wrote: post #111
NavinF wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood bigger and more numerous camera bumps until I used optical zoom and took photos at night. Image quality with thick lenses is incomparably superior to that of thin lenses and 3 image sensors collect 3x as many photons as 1 so you don't have to hold the phone still for such a long time. Ideally the entire backside of my phone would be lenses

and your 1500€ phone still sucks compared to my 500€ DSLR, lol

Yeah I seriously doubt that. Not without a lens that costs 3x-4x times the camera. If you spent 500€ on a kit that makes iPhone or Pixel photos look bad... you bought it stolen, lol.

Re: Zeiss's "Holocam" turns glass windows into cameras

#147

Post by ChuckMcM »

KMnO4 wrote: post #15

The article is poorly written, as it only discusses the camera component. Strangely, they chose stock images of holographic and optical displays, but didn’t mention that even once. The Zeiss site is a much better read: https://www.zeiss.com/corporate/en/about-zeiss/present/newsr... In summary: 1) ZEISS unveils holographic Smart Glass at CES 2024, both for displays/projection/filtering, but also another component whic…

First, holy crap!

Second, #3 is always a red flag for me. It is sometimes code for "we can do this in the lab but we have no idea how one would manufacture it." A similar analogy is "we've got this great idea for a program you can license but no one here knows how to actually code it up."

Third, the impact of this going mainstream would be hard to underestimate. All those people working on transparent displays like they do in sci-fi movies? Yup they could do that. A video conference system with solid eye contact (mentioned in a couple of places) sure you could do that too. A mirror that could show you wearing different clothes? Yup I could see how that would be coded.

That #3 though. That is what tempers my enthusiasm. Did I miss any announcement that they had a display at CES? (or was it just an announcement) If the former I would seriously consider flying over to Vegas to check this out.

Re: Zeiss's "Holocam" turns glass windows into cameras

#148

Post by raphman »

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #21

It's a reverse light guide. We've been beam forming for a long time, it's unsurprising that the reverse is possible (imaging through a light pipe). The principal issue will be gathering enough energy. A well lit source like a bathroom mirror (mirror behind the light guide) could work pretty well I'd wager. If the light guide is too efficient then it will appear opaque, so there is a trade-off. I find "turns any windo…

As I posted below, Microsoft's Applied Sciences Group did something similar (I guess) back in 2011:

https://www.microsoft.com/applied-sciences/uploads/publicati...

https://www.microsoft.com/applied-sciences/projects/the-wedg...

Re: Zeiss's "Holocam" turns glass windows into cameras

#149

Post by pedalpete »

haswell wrote: post #10

> Given the current fear around hidden cameras in Airbnbs, the idea of every single window (or even shower door) in a rental property being able to spy on you is a little disconcerting. While there are some really interesting potential applications for this tech, it is also more than a little disconcerting. The ubiquity of camera phones and the emergence of tech like those Meta glasses is already pushing us to discon…

I'm surprised this isn't the top comment. I'm all for the benefits of this tech, and hadn't even thought about the airbnb style implication.

People didn't like that Google Glass could always be filming, now we don't even have a physical camera.

Rayban/Meta (I believe) have a sensor to detect that the wearer has not attempted to cover the light which shows that the camera is in use, but how will that work when every piece of glass is a camera.

Re: Zeiss's "Holocam" turns glass windows into cameras

#150

Post by shrx »

nonrepeating wrote: post #108
AnarchismIsCool wrote: post #74

For the people kinda worried: this is a highly specialized piece of glass that is extremely complicated to manufacture at present and must, due to the laws of thermodynamics, not be 100% transparent. It's not going to allow surveillance through existing glass installations in any form, just possibly new ones if there's room for the support equipment and through the use of 4-5 digit piles of cash. Any camera glass lik…

Thanks. The original description made this seem like far-future technological magic. A system that can somehow analyze a random pane of glass and derive all the transformations needed to use it as a high-precision waveguide? I actually had a manager ask me to develop such a thing, and I asked him how many dozen optics PhDs I could hire to accomplish this feat.

Apparently the number is finite.
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