IEEE Spectrum November, 2016 - 36

he best digital cameras today are

SLRs (single-lens reflex cameras), which use a movable mirror to guide the same light rays that fall on the sensor into
the viewfinder. These cameras normally have precisely ground glass lenses
and large, high-quality image sensors. In the right hands, they can shoot
amazing pictures, with brilliant colors and pleasing lighting effects, often
showing a crisply focused subject and an aesthetically blurred background.
* But these cameras are big, heavy, and expensive: A good digital SLR (DSLR)
with a decent set of lenses-including a standard 50 mm, a wide angle, and a
telephoto, for example-can easily set you back thousands of dollars. * So most
photos today aren't being shot with DSLRs but with the tiny camera modules
built into mobile phones. Nobody pretends these pictures match the quality
of a photograph taken by a good DSLR; they tend to be grainy, and the camera allows very little artistic control. But smartphone cameras certainly are
easy to carry around. * Can't we have it both ways? Couldn't a high-quality
yet still-tiny camera somehow be fit into a mobile device? * That's the question I asked myself five years ago. And the very positive answer, announced
last October and shipping early in 2017, is coming from a company I started:
Light. * The Light camera starts with a collection of inexpensive plastic-lens
camera modules and mechanically driven mirrors. We put them in a device
that runs the standard Android operating system along with some smart
algorithms. The result is a camera that can do just about everything a DSLR
can-and one thing it can't: fit in your pocket. More on how it works later. First,
let me tell you a little bit about my background, because that helps explain
how-and why-I came up with this approach.
36

NOV 2016

NORTh AMERICAN

SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG

in 2011, i was looking for my next
challenge. I had just left Flarion Technologies, a company I had founded and
later sold. My engineering career-as
a researcher at Lucent Technologies'
Bell Labs, before I started Flarion-had
been in communications and information theory, so I'd expected to stay
involved in those technologies. But I
found myself instead thinking more
and more about cameras.
I had taken photographs with film
cameras as a child in India, but I never
had any particularly good equipment.
I was intrigued when digital photography started taking off, but I didn't buy
my first digital camera until 1999, when
my daughter was born. I took a lot of
pictures with that Kodak camera, then
moved on to various Sony digital cameras. Eventually, when DSLRs came out,
I went all out, purchasing a couple of
DSLR cameras, a bunch of Canon lenses,
and all sorts of other equipment-three
camera bags' worth. And I took lots of
pictures with this gear.
Ten-plus years later, I got an iPhone
and also started taking pictures with
it, not because the quality was really
there but because of the convenience:
I had to plan ahead if I wanted to take
pictures with one of my good cameras,
which I did less and less. As I talked with
other avid photographers, I discovered I
wasn't the only one who had expensive
camera gear gathering dust. It's not that
any of us were happy with the quality
of the pictures we were taking with our
phones-indeed, we were all frustrated
by it. But at the end of the day, convenience always won out.
So when I was looking around for a
new professional challenge, I realized
I could attack a problem I was dealing
with myself. But I didn't start immediately; I didn't know optics well, and I
assumed that if there was to be a technical solution it would come from somebody who did.
But I kept investigating, and I soon
discovered that most experts in optics
don't really understand digital-image
processing, and electrical engineers
and computer scientists who understand digital images don't generally
PhoTogRAPh by

Gabriela Hasbun

http://SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum November, 2016