
Droplet lens turns a smartphone into a 160X microscope - taivo
http://www.kurzweilai.net/droplet-lens-turns-a-smartphone-into-a-160x-microscope
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makmanalp
If anyone was frustrated at the lack of sample images like me:
[http://www.opticsinfobase.org/boe/fulltext.cfm?uri=boe-5-5-1...](http://www.opticsinfobase.org/boe/fulltext.cfm?uri=boe-5-5-1626&id=284161#g004)

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skierscott
And an imgur gallery[1] with the two examples.

[1]:[http://imgur.com/a/0IQ5v](http://imgur.com/a/0IQ5v)

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coreymgilmore
Very cool. The usefulness to poorer reguina of the world and for education
could be immense.

Combine this lens with the paper microscope from a few weeks ago
([http://www.ted.com/talks/manu_prakash_a_50_cent_microscope_t...](http://www.ted.com/talks/manu_prakash_a_50_cent_microscope_that_folds_like_origami)).

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RankingMember
Digging these new cheap microscope concepts (this is and the as-of-yet
unbuyable paper microscope). Just reading about them moved me to build this
contraption someone linked to in the paper microscope thread comments:

[http://www.instructables.com/id/10-Smartphone-to-digital-
mic...](http://www.instructables.com/id/10-Smartphone-to-digital-microscope-
conversion/)

It's pretty cool, but if you build one, definitely use caution and wear eye
protection when drilling through the Plexiglas.

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jacquesm
Seconded on the eye protection. Also, drill slow (without too much pressure)
and drill a pilot hole so you stay centered.

There are special plexiglass drills, those make life a bit easier, a glass bit
works as well (even better, actually).

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brbcoding
This reminds me of this Kickstarter project that I backed a while back:
[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/968523355/micro-
phone-l...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/968523355/micro-phone-lens-
cell-phone-based-microscope)

This one just sticks to your phone rather than requiring an enclosure, but
only has a max zoom of 60x (or 15x without phone zoom).

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shocks
'Phone zoom' is all software, so it wouldn't be true 60x.

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dspillett
That depends on the phone.

Some Nokia devices (for one example I know of: no doubt there exist other
cameras and camera phones that do something similar) have a higher resolution
CCD than they need for unzoomed images and use the extra resolution for noise
reduction and such when scaling the image down to the final size - so with
zoom you genuinely get more detail but possibly at the expense of extra signal
noise.

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collyw
OK, kind of cool, but would you not be better with a real camera on the end
rather than a half arsed phone camera?

I am aware that the lens is usually what makes camera phones poor in
comparison to regular cameras, but I still find my phone camera barley usable,
and the quality crap compared to my point and shoot camera. I am sure it isn't
only down to the lens.

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higherpurpose
Innovations like these will happen a lot more often once there's a proper
hardware platform for this, like ARA is.

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collyw
What's ARA? Sounds like it might be interesting.

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spyder
Looks like the similar Foldscope is more powerful because it can do up to
2000x magnification:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foldscope](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foldscope)

~~~
taivo
In terms of magnification, yes, but there are also many other variables that
can be relevant, so I guess it's good to have multiple cheap designs to choose
from, depending on the goal and circumstances. For example Foldscope seems to
be using ball lens, which indeed gives higher magnification, but probably also
suffers more from aberration, may be trickier to fix firmly and precisely into
the microscope housing compared to the lens that are already created on a flat
plate, etc., so for those tasks where lower magnification is sufficient or
preferred the droplet lens might sometimes be more suitable.

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Too
Discussion from last week
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7657521](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7657521)

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dang
That discussion wasn't very extensive so we won't kill this one as a dupe.

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dvdt
This is awesome work. I just want to point out that it's pretty much a
marketing lie to say that the lens gives you 160x magnification. Sort of like
saying how digital zoom gives you magnification on a camera.

A non-linkbait title would also report the numerical aperture of their
microscope. From their paper, it looks like the new lens performs comparably
to a research grade 10x 0.25NA objective.

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jebblue
We saw this on AOL On on ROKU last week-end, pretty cool.

