Pelican Imaging Wants to Replace Your Phone Camera with 25 Small Ones

Pelican Imaging, a Californian start-up, has unveiled a prototype mobile phone that makes use of light-field photography in its camera.

Light-field photography works by grabbing lots of small images rather than one big one.

Clever image processing then pieces all the data together in order to build an actual photograph. Using this method means that the user can adjust the focus and change the depth of field to blur or sharpen specific parts of the image after the shot has been taken.

The Pelican prototype boasts “the industry’s thinnest high-resolution camera, targeting smartphones and tablets“.

This could in fact shift the focus (sorry) from more traditional lenses and sensors found in camera phones and tablets and remove the usual trade-off between the sensitivity and resolution of a camera and its thickness.

This is pretty exciting stuff – what do think?