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Never a company to shy away from innovation, Sony has released an image taken with a new curved sensor currently under development that mimics the retina of a human eye. Unlike the standard flat sensor used in today’s digital cameras, curved sensors come with some highly desirable benefits: excellent edge-to-edge image quality, improved sensitivity, and the promise of simpler lenses.

In a presentation at the 2014 Symposia on VLSI Technology and Circuits in Honolulu, June 9–13, Kazuichiro Itonaga, Sony’s device manager, showed a picture of the company’s prototype curved CMOS image sensor. Industry watchers speculate that the sensor is manufactured flat, bent into shape and then reinforced with a ceramic backplate.
 

The curvature of the new sensor is known as a “Petzval surface,” a shape resulting from the physics of light rays passing through a lens: the more off-axis the rays are from the optical axis of the lens, the lower the effective focal length they experience. With a flat sensor, complex optical correction has to take place in the lens so that more oblique light rays are correctly projected onto the flat image plane. Not so with the curved sensor, where no such elaborate lens design would be needed.

The rumor mill has already started churning, with speculation that a new curved sensor design could—in the not too distant future—find its way into a successor to Sony’s fixed-lens full-frame camera, the RX1.

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