Samsung Working To Remove The Camera Hump From Its Flagships

According to Samsung, the company is working to make the “camera humps” of smartphones, which have recently been growing, unnecessary. To do this, the Korean electronics giant wants to use the concept of so-called metal lenses, which are to replace conventional optics.

As Petapixel reports, Samsung announced a few days ago at the industry event Nano Korea 2021 that its Samsung Electro-Mechanic division is working on making so-called metal lenses suitable for the mass market. Instead of conventional lenses and mechanics, the new lenses should use a coating of nanostructures to guide light onto the camera sensor.

Metalens System Already In Place

There are already initial successes in the field of Metalinsen. Various research institutes have proven that, for example, a coating of quartz and titanium dioxide can create small “towers” or “pillars” on a nanometer scale, which refract the incident light so that it can fall in focus on an image sensor located behind it.

In the course of a research project at MIT, a camera with a metal lens that has no moving parts but can still focus on certain objects has already been created. A Metalens system has already been developed at the University of Ottawa in Canada, which is basically able to replace the optics of modern, larger digital cameras.

With the startup Metalenz there are also first attempts to commercialize the technology and use it in smartphones. For its part, Samsung now wants to work on placing metal lenses with nanoparticles between the glass cover of the camera and the sensor in order to make the curved optical lenses of current devices superfluous. Initially, the technology should find its way into Samsung’s own devices before external customers can be supplied with it.