So they used a converter with an optical element? Just like the good old SLR-era adapters that let you put Canon lenses on a Nikon body? Or a speed booster adapter for F-mount lenses on an E-mount mirrorless body? That's hardly innovative.
Not like that. SLRs don't have a built-in lens to contend with, and merely putting another lens over the iPhone's integrated one won't have the desired effect.
There are adapters where the integrated lens is focused on a flat disk of ground glass that's vibrated to move the grain around. The principal lens then projects an image onto the ground glass for the camera to record. This technique was used way back with camcorders and such to get a full frame effect on the cheap, before the DSLR video phenomenon happened.
While it's unclear if Panavision's implementation uses vibrating ground glass, the fundamentals will be the same: the iPhone is recording an image that's been projected onto an external surface.
Incidentally, I think an advert for one of those camcorders back in the day that used this technique would be decidedly judged as deceptive!
I haven't heard of adapters with ground glass projection. Thanks for that info. Seems like a lot of effort to get image of inferior quality. The more pieces of glass light passes through the more chromatic aberration and optical distortion affects it. Also, ground glass would potentially degrade image quality.
It's got to be more than just a typical speedbooster, given that they have to adapt a comparatively huge focal plane to a lens aperture about 3mm in diameter. The article speculates that they use some sort of lens relay system, perhaps with an aerial image rather than a ground glass intermediate, but doesn't provide any more information. I'd love to see a detailed technical explanation.
No, this would be an adapter that creates a virtual image (the article calls this "aerial image", which is wrong), which you can then in turn look at with your eyes or another camera. Nikon used to sell this, search for "Nikon Lens Scope Converter". The difference with a speed booster is that those still create a real image, just with a different focus.
