Project 1: Camera Project#

In this project you will be analyzing a cell phone camera in comparison to a Nikon DLSR camera. This project can be broken up into two main parts: (1) comparison between cameras, and (2) the design of an attachment.

This project will require a detailed report. It should be typed up and include an introduction with several references. The references do not need to be journal papers but can be web resources, trade journals, etc. You do not need to reference anything that is contained in the book or on the class notes. You will also need to include a summary section that highlights the main points and results from your report.

All figures and tables need to have a caption and be referred to in the text. You need to use Microsoft Word for the report.

Comparison Section#

In the comparison section of project you will be comparing a cell phone camera to a simple point and shoot camera. All smart phones have good cameras on them.

Start with the cell phone camera. We will be using a Google Pixel 3 camera. The camera that we will compare the cell phone camera to is Nikon D3100 with an AF-S DX NIKKOR lens.

Be sure to include at least the following in your comparison:

  • What is the field of view for each camera? Remember that the cell phone camera has a single field of view but the Nikon camera has a field of view range.

  • Draw the ray trace for the on-axis and both full-angle rays (there should be 6 of these ray traces). This drawing needs to be done to scale using a graphics program. You need to use the same scale factor for each camera and be sure to state the scale factor. The actual lens system is made up of multiple lens elements but is this report you will treat the system as a perfect lens. This approach is accurate because you are effectively using the concept of principal planes.

  • What are the sizes of each pixel in the image at a distance of 10 feet (there should be 3 of these)?

  • The main differences between these cameras are (1) the amount of collected light and (2) the optical focus. How much more light does the Nikon camera collect than the Pixel camera?

Design Portion#

The design portion of the project is to design an attachment for the smart phone. One of the biggest deficiencies of smart phone is the lack of optical zoom. They all come with a digital zoom, but this is approximately the same as just taking a picture and then cropping it in a graphics program like Photoshop. Using perfect lenses you need to design an attachment for the cell phone that will produce the same field-of-view as the telephoto limit of the Nikon camera. You will be modeling the cell phone camera with a perfect lens that has a focal length equal to its effective focal length. The attachment needs to be tolerant to spacing between the last lens of your attachment and the cell phone camera lens. It should be able to handle a spacing from 0.1mm - 2mm.