July 6, 2011  Researchers develop lens-free, pinhead-size camera
It's like a Brownie camera for the digital age: The microscopic
device fits on the head of a pin, contains no lenses or moving
parts, costs pennies to make -- and this Cornell-developed
camera could revolutionize an array of science from surgery to
robotics.  The camera was invented in the lab of Alyosha Molnar,
assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, and
developed by a group led by Patrick Gill, a postdoctoral
associate. Their working prototype, detailed online in the
journal Optics Letters July 6, is a 100th of a millimeter thick
and one-half millimeter on each side. The camera resolves images
about 20 pixels across -- not portrait studio quality, but
enough to shed light on previously hard-to-see things.  "It's
not going to be a camera that people take family portraits
with," Gill explained. "But there are a lot of applications out
there that require just a little bit of dim vision."  In fact,
Gill, whose other research i