New cameras don’t just capture photons; they compute pictures.
Brian Hayes in American Scientist:
The digital camera has brought a revolutionary shift in the nature of photography, sweeping aside more than 150 years of technology based on the weird and wonderful photochemistry of silver halide crystals. Curiously, though, the camera itself has come through this transformation with remarkably little change. A digital camera has a silicon sensor where the film used to go, and there’s a new display screen on the back, but the lens and shutter and the rest of the optical system work just as they always have, and so do most of the controls. The images that come out of the camera also look much the same—at least until you examine them microscopically.
But further changes in the art and science of photography may be coming soon. Imaging laboratories are experimenting with cameras that don’t merely digitize an image but also perform extensive computations on the image data.
More here. [The photo below is a more “painterly” image rendered by a digital camera.]
