Photonic Shunkan

At the moment, phone companies tout the imaging capabilities of their phone cameras and try to outdo each other. It is clear that for a proportion of buyers, image quality matters and is a draw factor towards increased sales. The trend is towards ever higher resolution phone camera sensors and some people may wonder if the upwards trend will continue to infinity and beyond. Yet there is another component of the smart phone whose resolution is well behind digital resolutions achieved back in the 1980s and which shows no trend towards improvement, and that is with audio sound quality. In the 1980s, Sony and Phillips put together a file protocol known as the Red Book Protocol achieving 16-bit Linear PCM (pulse-code modulation) sampled at 44.1 kHz. Today, ultra high resolution PCM protocols go up to 32-bits and 768kHz sampling. The Sony CDP-101 released in 1982 used an audio file protocol with a much higher resolution than the majority of modern listeners utilise today when listenin...

The largest astronomical telescope is the Gran Telescopio Canarias in Spain. It has an effective aperture of 10.4m in diameter. The larger the aperture, the better the resolution. Even in a post-truth world you still cannot overcome the limits imposed by physics. This brings us to a widespread delusion amongst photo enthusiasts today. Many think that the sensor resolution on their cameras can be increased infinitely. People think that at the present rate of exponential rise in digital sensor resolution that the sky is the limit. Soon we may get smartphone sensors that reach 100MP in resolution, 35mm format sensors that reach 100TP (terapixels) etc etc ad infinitum. But there is a problem. It is called the lens. You can increase the bandwidth of the digital component all you want but you have to increase the size of the lens to go with that. If you wanted to make use of a camera sensor with 100TP in resolution, you might need to mount a lens with a nice 10-metre aperture diamet...