Lumicera
Is The Latest Material In Digital Technology
By Dikla Kadosh
When I hear the word “ceramic,”
I think pottery. I picture children bringing home lop-sided bowls
and colorful mugs made in art class. Thanks to the engineers at Casio
and Murata Manufacturing, however, ceramic has a whole new set of
meanings that are completely unrelated to kitchenware. In the digital
photography realm, ceramic now means high-precision optics, compact
zoom lenses and smaller, thinner digital cameras than ever before.
Using transparent ceramics,
Casio has developed a super-thin lens that it has incorporated into
its line of credit card-sized Exilim digital cameras. The new lens
reduces the already compact cameras’ profiles by an additional
20 percent while improving the optical quality.
The world’s first transparent ceramic lens was created using
Lumicera, a transparent polycrystalline ceramic first developed by
Murata Manufacturing in 2001. A type of dielectric resonator, the
material offers high levels of transmissivity and has good optical
characteristics without birefringence (similar to diffraction), which
makes it an ideal choice for lenses.
Lumicera transmits light much like the optical glass that’s
commonly used in camera lenses today. The difference is that Lumicera’s
refractive index is much greater than that of optical glass, an important
property that caught Casio’s attention. Another property that
makes Lumicera more appealing than glass is its superior strength.
Because the material is stronger, it can be used to create thinner
lenses that are just as durable if not more so than those made of
glass.
Working together to refine Lumicera for use in digital camera optical
lenses, Casio and Murata Manufacturing improved its transmission of
short-wavelength light and eliminated pores, or air bubbles, which
reduced its transparency. Casio took the development further by treating
the lens with a special coating and combining polishing material,
time and pressure to produce a transparent ceramic lens with a high
level of precision.
Lumicera made its debut this summer, appearing in Casio’s Exilim
Card EX-S100, one of the smallest digital cameras in the world to
offer an optical zoom. The 2.8x zoom lens is housed in a super-sleek,
stainless-steel body that measures a mere 0.66 inches in thickness.
Expected to be used in future compact models, the transparent ceramic
lens has made pocketable digital cameras easier than ever before to
slip into your pocket.
While Casio may be the first camera manufacturer to incorporate transparent
ceramics into lens technology, we have a feeling it won’t be
the last. The lighter, stronger, more compact lenses are highly appealing,
and other companies are certain to be interested in adopting the technology
for use in their cameras.
