If you thought you’d seen it all, think again. In today’s insane tech piece, we take a look at the OmniVision OV6948 that enters the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s smallest camera.

World’s Smallest Camera: OmniVision OV6948

I know you have a lot of questions so let’s try and answer all of them.

How small is it?

Well, to put it in simple terms, the OmniVision OV6948 is as small as a grain of sand.

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As seen in the image above, the OV6948 measures in super-small at just 0.575 x 0.575 x 0.232mm. Surprisingly at that size, it is still able to take good 40,000-pixel colour images using an RGB Bayer back-side-illuminating chip.

Why is it that small?

The creators deem that it is useful in very specific cases for instance in surgery. Especially when you think of the benefits it has for neurology, ophthalmology, ENT, cardiology, spinal injuries, urology, gynaecology and arthroscopy.

For now, surgeons do this without any camera — acting blind. The only cameras capable of anything close to this are very few, but they also have a much lower resolution fibre optic feed.

With such a camera, the diameter of the endoscope will not exceed 1 mm. This will then allow you to visually examine even small blood vessels in the patient’s body.

Features

• It captures up to 30 frames per second (FPS) and can have analogue output at over 4mm away with minimal noise.
• It has a 120-degree super-wide-angle field of view, something that on a regular camera would come up as 14nm on a full-frame sensor.
• The depth of field spans between 3mm and 30mm.
• Images are of 200 x 200 or 40 thousand pixels with a size of 1.75 microns.
• The OmniVision camera can withstand temperatures ranging from -20° C to +70° C.

The price of the camera is not known yet.