Light
The smartphone is the dominant camera in the world now, combining best in class portability with good enough quality. I still own an SLR, though, because for some special situations, the superior lens selection and larger sensor is worth its larger form factor (among other qualities).
Light is a company with a novel approach to bringing smartphone cameras up to SLR quality.
Rather than hewing to this one-to-one ratio, Light aims to put a bunch of small lenses, each paired with its own image sensor, into smartphones and other gadgets. They’ll fire simultaneously when you take a photo, and software will automatically combine the images. This way, Light believes, it can fit the quality and zoom of a bulky, expensive DSLR camera into much smaller, cheaper packages—even phones.
Light is still in the early stages, as it doesn’t yet have a prototype of a full product completed. For now it just has camera modules whose pictures can be combined with its software. But the startup says it expects the first Light cameras, with 52-megapixel resolution, to appear in smartphones in 2016.
Artist's rendering of what a Light camera array on a smartphone might look like.
I've been curious to see how smartphones continue to improve camera quality. This seems like one credible vector.