New Medical Camera the Size of a Grain of Salt 132
kkleiner writes "The German Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration recently reported the development of a camera with a lens attached that is 1 x 1 x 1.5 millimeters in size, which is roughly as big as a grain of salt. At about a cubic millimeter in size, this camera is right at the size limit that the human eye can see unaided. The camera not only produces decent images but is also very cheap to manufacture — so cheap, in fact, that it is considered disposable."
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Privacy, we're fucked....
Since a long time ago.. This makes it easier to fight back. Let the damn cops try to find the camera now.
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That's an interesting take on the situation... except you still have to hook it up to a power supply and a recording system in order for it to be useful, and provide some sort of environmental shielding around the camera and the cable. The bulk of a camera today isn't found in the sensor.
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That's all okay. It doesn't have to look like a camera. And you don't have to look like you're filming anything, so nobody can identify the cameraman. So even with their twisted interpretation of wiretap law, nobody can be charged. You might not be able to use the video (nor want to, without giving yourself away) as evidence in court, but you can still tag the cop on youtube.
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Pretty sure that can all be managed by hooking the cameras up in a pair of sunglasses or the like.
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if they are so cheap.... (Score:1)
....then I might want to pick one up to play around with it and maybe find other uses for it
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Why did you have to put such a thought into my head!?
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Is it wrong that the first application I thought of was to give one of these to the Goatse guy? :)
Yes. You could get a Panavision film camera in there.
Re:if they are so cheap.... (Score:5, Insightful)
2. It's so tiny that there's no way it could have a useful FOV for anything macroscopic, much less be able to focus on anything more than a few cm away.
3. This is medical technology we're talking about, so there's probably a hundred-thousand licensing fee to even look at it, even if the camera itself is only a few pennies.
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TFA doesn't really say much about the cost, but if they follow the general trend of high-tech gizmos, they'll probably be as cheap as peanuts in a few years, if not sooner. As for the FOV, you could put a dozen of these in an array, like an insect eye, and then construct a high-res image in software. As a bonus, you'd also get some range info and limited 3D possibilities.
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Cheap is relative. Most of these cameras are used to avoid surgery or other invasive procedures. Remember, a lot of these types cameras are intended to be swallowed. Which means, even if the camera costs a couple thousand dollars, its cheap. I honestly doubt they are anywhere near that expensive, but my point releases, "cheap" is relative.
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However, the authors of the article seem to have very bad eyes, if 1x1x1.5mm is already at the limit of what they can see unaided.
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However, the authors of the article seem to have very bad eyes, if 1x1x1.5mm is already at the limit of what they can see unaided.
...limit of what the human eye can see at a distance of...
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... at any distance.
There are objects which are large enough that you can see them, provided they are in a place where you can see them (this place depends on the size of the object). This includes stars, plantes, tennis balls, flees. Then there are objects which are so small that you cannot see them with the naked eye, regardless of where they are. This includes electrons, atoms, molecules, bacteria. The limit of things you can see is somewhere between bacteria and flees. It definitely is much smaller than
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You have to take this announcement... (Score:5, Funny)
...with a grain of salt.
(But watch out, that grain of salt might be a tiny camera.)
well... (Score:1)
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Seriously.
This ain't your run of the mill table salt.
SI units fail? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know what would be more amazing. People confusing a 1mm cube for a "grain of salt", or people being unable to see a 1mm cube object without aid. That's like the size of a ball bearing, or short grain rice! I didn't realize SI units were this hard to grasp...
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Yeah. 1mm x 1mm x 1.5mm isn't anywhere near approaching the smallest size the human eye can see unaided (remember the iPhone's retina display?). And they probably meant Kosher salt (the kind they put on pretzels).
I suspect that what they meant was that, the average person would just barely be able to spot one of these stuck on a nearby wall unless they got up close to it, where they'd be able to see it better.
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Oh good, I'm not the only one who noticed that a grain of salt is smaller than a match head. I thought for a moment they were talking about the little dot in the middle of that thing, not the whole device itself. Whew... I may not use mm to measure very often, but I didn't think my perception of it was that off.
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The actual press release said a grain of "coarse" salt.
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Disposable cameras [google.com] smaller than a grain of "course salt" [himalayan-...-lamps.com] have been commonly available for decades [wikipedia.org].
[/pedantic]
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Define "course," pseudo-pedant.
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People confusing a 1mm cube for a "grain of salt"
A 1mm cube seems to be a pretty good match for a grain of salt [seul.org] and while that is certainly not invisible for the human eye, if you watch it from a meter away you could certainly run into trouble finding it.
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Ya, that left me wondering too. Maybe they're measuring the human perception of an object at say 30' or something. :)
I still don't get this insane concept of size that people keep trying to apply. as big as a grain of sand, car (VW bug or Lincoln Limo?), or as much information as the Library of Congress. {sigh}
It's not just on here, nor on poorly written news stories. I find people grasping at the idea of how to express size all the time. I always start with
Metric rulers (Score:2)
Actually, if you've ever wondered why rulers don't have millimeters markings on them, this is why--they can't be seen by the unaided eye!
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Insect Eyes (Score:2, Insightful)
Put enough of them together and we might be able to make a decent approximation of the faceted eyes of insects
Privacy Schmivacy (Score:2)
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A tiny camera won't do much good for you if you are thinking only of prostate cancer. For that you can use the PSA blood test, but after an anomaly is identified you will have to be subjected to the touch exam. Unless someone makes a device to measure the prostate's volume, texture, density, etc., which will definitely not be a camera.
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Unless someone makes a device to measure the prostate's volume, texture, density, etc., which will definitely not be a camera.
It's called an ultrasound [medscape.com]. Now, roll up your sleeves and bend over.
In America.... (Score:5, Insightful)
In the United States, where the hospital bills for a procedure of this kind are likely to run into thousands of dollars, "disposable" has a pretty broad definition.
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That's what I thought too. TFA doesn't say, but the press release (one of the "sources" listed in TFA) indicates that they'll be bringing disposable endoscopes to the market in 2012 for "only a few euros".
Also, "decent" image = 250x250 pixels at 44 FPS. No indication of whether it's color or grayscale, but I suspect it's grayscale. The press release says it supplies "razor-sharp pictures", but I suspect that's only by comparison to existing endoscopes...
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Maybe 'razor sharp' is like after your wife uses in on her legs but forgets to mention it...
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I'm sorry, but I'm afraid I need a car analogy.
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it's razor sharp, like a car driving under a truck trailer
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Probably greyscale. They didn't say how large the imager is, but it can't be larger than 1mm x 1mm, probably a bit less, which means even at 250x250 pixels you're dealing with 2um or smaller sensors. From the look of the tiny pinhole of a lens, they're probably already diffraction limited on resolution. To get color using the typical Bayer pattern, you'd need to go to 1um or smaller sensor sites. Ouch!
In Soviet Russia (Score:1)
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Soviet Russia had universal healthcare, so at least the disposal wouldn't cost you anything. ;)
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And then Stalin disposes of the doctors. [wikipedia.org]
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In the United States, where the hospital bills for a procedure of this kind are likely to run into thousands of dollars, "disposable" has a pretty broad definition.
Yes, because the billable time for the techs, the cost of certification of the equipment and various other overhead costs nothing.
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In the United States, where the hospital bills for a procedure of this kind are likely to run into thousands of dollars, "disposable" has a pretty broad definition.
Yes, because the billable time for the techs, the cost of certification of the equipment and various other overhead costs nothing.
I think the point is that if the various overheads you mention are on the order of $5000, an extra $500 "disposable" camera is reasonable, even if in other contexts the idea of throwing away $500 worth of equipment seems unreasonable...
Re:In America.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not if you can bill the customer more for the "latest and greatest".
Just because it costs health care providers less, that doesn't mean that you should expect it to cost YOU less.
Are you blind? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Nor do grains of salt that the typical diner encounters run that size. This is closer to the size of a grain of rice (short grain, uncooked), for those who aren't aware of what a millimeter is.
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I'm sorry, but I'm afraid I need a car analogy..
a millimeter is the same as a 0.040" spark plug gap.
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As long as there's none lower nor fruitier.
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And an exploding ball of gas a million miles apart can be much harder to see than a spec of dust. I'd say whoever came up with that statement is kind of retarded, even ignoring the lack of a distance to the object. After all... compare a single pixel - . - to 1mm x 1mm. That's at least an order of magnitude smaller, yet I can see it comfortably from 3 feet away.
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Re:Are you blind? (Score:5, Interesting)
It depends how far away your eye is from it. The claim stands.
Then you could make the same claim for anything.
"US Navy reveals a a new battleship that is smaller than the human eye can see*
*if the human is 5 million miles away from said battleship"
Reasonably, 'at the size limit the human eye can see' to me means exactly that. There is a size below which you can't see unaided, no matter how close you bring your eye to the object because there's a limit to how closely your eye can focus. That size is at least one, and probably 2 orders of magnitude smaller than this camera.
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I found a picture of the submitter [karneval-megastore.de] explains alot :-)
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So, you're saying the camera is the size of a moon. ... wait ...
That's no moon ... It's a space station.
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Just as a comparison, the capacitor in this image [gjcp.net] is about 0.75x0.75x1mm - and I really only use the USB microscope if I need a photograph of the board to show any water damage or anything like that. The transistor below it is about the same size as this camera. I don't even use a magnifier for parts that large.
There are some SMT parts that actually *are* the size of a grain of salt. I *do* use a magnifier for those.
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There used to be an ad running in EE Times, showing a bunch of gains, with the caption "the larger ones are pepper" -- an add for someone's 0201 passive components, I think. These are 0.6 mm × 0.3 mm, and you can definitely see them, though forget it if you drop one on the floor. Still, much better under a microscope. I once hand soldered an 01005 part (0.4mm x 0.2mm) under a microscope... not easy. And yeah, you can see it without the scope, but not well enough to really recognize it as anything but a
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That's before I started soldering it. That's how it left Kenwood. I haven't got any "after" pics.
About half my work at the moment involves removing lead-free solder from equipment and resoldering it all with leaded solder, just to clean up that sort of mess.
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Nobody has defined the distance.
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well, I can't see it unaided.. but maybe that's why I got these -6 glasses.
but if it's so cheap, how about making a 1000x1000 grid of those.
Poetry (Score:3)
Sprinkle vision on the wind,
like grains of sand I see.
motes of thought they drift and float,
and bring my data back to me.
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Who got grains of sand in her vagina
Though some were cameras yet
And the whole internet
Shocked her into attack of angina
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Tiny camera
Engineered in Germany
Pushes the limit
an App for that... (Score:2)
might be cool to see blood coursing through your veins, or the contents of your stomach on your iPhone :)
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The stomach however, isn't a problem. I've heard of people putting much stranger things in their digestive systems...
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might be cool to see blood coursing through your veins, or the contents of your stomach on your iPhone :)
A technical embolism?
Limit of human vision? (Score:2)
Surveillance / espionage uses! (Score:2)
"Considered Disposable" (Score:2)
Well, they better be, if any sort of recovery device is going to be several times the size of the camera itself...
My Margarita! (Score:2)
Light Source? (Score:2)
It's kinda, you know, dark in there.
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Diminishing Returns (Score:2)
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I hadn't thought of that application but it's interesting... I imagine that after 9 months, the baby you've been filming will seem a lot larger and more troublesome than the pesky camera..
Porn! (Score:2)
Sperm cam!
Here's an idea. (Score:1)
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We already have that. It's called capsule endoscopy [wikipedia.org] and it has been in use since 2001.
It's just that it's more expensive than traditional endoscopy so it isn't widely used yet, except in cases where traditional methods can't reach.
Picture of the camera (Score:2)
.
Seriously!
Haiku (Score:2)
Camera small, like dust
Travel by wind, or fiber
Fantastic Voyage.
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Ah! Dropped the damn thing
Where are my glasses? Oh no
Trod on it. The pain
Disposable Endoscopes already exist (Score:1)
Awesome (Score:1)
development for hotel owners and land lords. You could easily set up multiple angle shots in shower cubicles.
This is just dumb (Score:2)
This leads to questions: (Score:2)
Who is going to load the tiny film? /serious note, what is the interface; wireless?
Resolution (Score:2)
From the article: So how good is the camera? For endoscopy, pretty good. The resolution is 62,500 (250 x 250) pixels and can produce a frame rate of 44 per second at this resolution
measurement ... (Score:1)
1 x 1 x 1.5 millimeters in size ... right at the size limit that the human eye can see unaided
Let's be serious here, 1 millimeter is not the limit of what the eye can see.
1/10 mm would be more like it.
3D version...from JPL (Score:2)
Jet Propulsion Laboratories has come out with a 3D camera, for brain surgery (developed in conjunction with a brain surgeon). It's not as small as this, but it's the size of a coffee bean. The constraint was 4mm; that's the largest passage they can make in a brain without causing serious harm.
Science reporting hyperbole (Score:2)
From TFA:
"...At about a cubic millimeter in size, this camera is right at the size limit that the human eye can see unaided...."
AFAIK the smallest thing viewable by the unaided human eye is 0.1-0.2 mm (100-200 microns).
I would hardly say that an order of magnitude is "right at the limit"?
How bad would your vision have to be to have trouble seeing this camera?
boon for laprosopy (Score:1)
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You can have something way better than an array of these. There's one in every digital camera. I'm not sure how you get 3D with it though, or what "true 3D" is.