Everyone is curious as to what Liquid Lens technology will look like after Xiaomi recently launched the world’s first Mi Mix Fold with Liquid Lens on a smartphone. For more than a decade and a half, this revolutionary technology has worked. The Liquid Lens Mi Mix Fold combines telephoto and macro photography capabilities in one lens, but there’s more to this technology than that.
That’s why I created this article to help you understand what Liquid Lens technology is, how it works as well as comprehensive examples with the technology. So, let’s start discussing the advantages and disadvantages of Liquid Lens technology.
What is Liquid Lens Technology and How Does It Work?
We’ll cover everything from the basic concepts of this Liquid Lens technology to how it works, its benefits and drawbacks, and more in this article. Let’s start with the understanding of Liquid lens technology.
What is Liquid Lens Technology?
To understand Liquid Lens technology, you must first understand the operation of conventional camera systems. Traditional camera systems, be it on a smartphone or DSLR, are mechanical. In other words, if you want to zoom in on a subject while using a DSLR, you need to change the lens first and zoom in using a motor which is a mechanical process.
Similarly, on smartphones, you need to switch the lens to telephoto to click images of distant subjects. In both scenarios, the process is done physically and mechanically. It took too much time to change lenses, zoom in, find depth-of-field, and focus on the subject. Also, in traditional camera systems, you cannot shoot images having different focal lengths using a single lens. For example, you can’t click on ultra-wide photos or enlarged images (telephoto), or very close photos (macro) with a single lens.
You need to switch to special lenses that vary in focal length for different shooting conditions. That’s why we are looking at large camera modules to enable multi-lens camera systems on modern smartphones. The traditional camera systems we know today are limited by a single focal length and relatively slow mechanical processing.
Liquid Lens technology wants to change this and doesn’t limit you to one type of lens. This is a new technology that uses a solution of water and oil to quickly create different focal lengths. In Liquid Lens system, you don’t need to change lenses. From a single lens, you can create multiple focal lengths, and it is also much faster to focus than traditional camera systems.
How Do Liquid Lenses Work?
The way Liquid Lens works is quite clever. Unlike mechanical camera systems, Liquid Lens uses electricity to change the focal length. That’s the main reason why Liquid Lens is so fast. The fact that the flow of water changes direction when you bring it closer to the electric field. What’s happening here is that electric fields can bend the flow of water into different shapes.
This change in the shape of water is very important here, and it forms the basis of Liquid Lens technology. If you take a water droplet and apply a voltage, you can change the shape of the droplet to a different curvature. This process is called electrowetting. In milliseconds, it can create positive, negative, or neutral curvature by changing the shape of the water droplet. And it gives you different focal lengths of a single lens.
In addition, in the Liquid Lens system, the shape is changed electrically so that the change between different focal lengths is very fast. What’s important to note is that this also drastically increases focus speed. In contrast to mechanical camera systems, Liquid Lens can find depth of field and calculate how far or near an object is in real-time, which increases focus speed exponentially.
Now, if you want to take an enlarged image, an ultra-wide photo, a standard wide image, or a macro image with absolutely no fixed focusing distance, you can do all that with extreme precision and faster with just one Liquid Lens.
How is Liquid Lens Different from Traditional Optical Lenses?
The optical lenses found in traditional camera systems are made of glass, and have a fixed radius of curvature. Liquid Lens, on the other hand, are tiny cells filled with optical-grade liquid, which is a mixture of water and oil, and can change shape to produce different curvature and focal length. So that is the main difference between Liquid Lens and Optical Lens.
Also, as I mentioned above, Liquid Lens are much faster at finding depth-of-field and focusing on the subject than optical lenses. Even when the subject is moving, the Liquid Lens can lock focus effectively while optical lenses struggle to focus.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Liquid Lenses
Advantages: There are many advantages of Liquid Lens over traditional optical lenses. First, it’s quite small in comparison to bulky DSLR lenses. Furthermore, it is much faster, offers multiple focal lengths, and consumes much less electricity than a motorized camera. What I love most about Liquid Lens is that it’s the perfect solution for smartphone cameras.
You don’t need a big camera module with multiple lenses. Just have one Liquid Lens in your device, and it will handle all focal lengths. Apart from that, Liquid Lens also provides decent image stabilization. Currently, the role of the fluid is mainly to create a distinct curve, but it can also help stabilize the image.
Deficiency: This Liquid Lens is still in development stage and needs some major improvements for wide adoption. Liquid Lens technology was first discovered by Bruno Berge in 2002, so the technology is relatively new. Berge now runs Varioptic, which is owned by Corning, the maker of Gorilla Glass. Experts say that light scattering is one of the problems that need to be fixed in this camera technology. In addition, the researcher must prevent the flow of fluids in tight spaces.
Mi Mix Fold with Liquid Lens
For the record, Samsung partnered with Varioptic in 2006 to bring Liquid Lens to its smartphones, but to no avail. Xiaomi recently launched the Mi Mix Fold a 3x – 30x Liquid Lens, being the first manufacturer to bring this technology to a smartphone. Now, we need to wait and see if Liquid Lens has fixed its flaws and is it ready for mass adoption or not.
So that’s what you need to know about Liquid Lens technology and how it will usher in a new era of lighter and faster camera systems. I’m really looking forward to this technology becoming the standard, especially in smartphones.
