Ever heard of EDoF? No, me neither until today but something that has to be taken into account in the future when buying a smartphone. EDoF stands for Extended Depth of Field and is a fixed focus lens technology to make pretty much everything sharp and in focus from about half a meter away from the camera to infinity. Steve Litchfield over at All About Symbian has a detailed post on the topic and the pictures that can be taken are quite stunning. Have a look for the details.
There is one big caveat, however: Quite often I take a picture of A4 pages instead of scanning them as it is much faster and usually more convenient. And that's the one thing EDoF has difficulties with as it can't focus on objects that are very close. And to take a picture of an A4 page it unfortunately has to be closer than what the technology is capable of focusing on. A bit of a pity, as that means I have to stay with smartphones that have a real auto-focus camera module for now.
Sounds awfully like a marketing mumbo jumbo to me. Using a more sensitive detector and increasing the lens stop number increases the depth of field in the same way. Maybe I'm wrong and this is truely innovative.
I use the same moble scanning trick as you for business meal receipts; works well enough with my existing fixed focus camera.
Posted by: dominic | December 21, 2010 at 10:04 AM