Originally posted by aliquis I'm new and may not understand the problem but I thought it was that light come in at and angle (always) out on the sides of the sensor and that it was some issue with "hitting the gaps" or lenses of the sensor receptors which broke of the light in some way. But maybe that's not it? Is it because the various wave lengths of light is already somewhat moved against eachother after the glass? Or don't all the lenses spread the light at the same angle over the sensor?
Or why doesn't it work and what's the cause of CA to begin with?
The problem is, that a curved sensor will be a new variable in this game. Lenses (in fact most) already have a somewhat curved focal plane and the lens designers aim to reduce this curvatore and get a flat focal plane, which then coincides with the flat film/sensor. The inherent field curvatore is mainly dependend on the focal length: the shorter the fl, the higher the amount of field curvatore. This is one of the reasons, why well-corrected wide angle lenses are expensive and have often a very complicated lens design.
If you now introduce a curved sensor, all those lenses, which were corrected to have a flatter field will be unuseable. Some lenses, with a curvatore near that of the sensor will improve in performance - but that would be a tiny number. Also, you then have to unify the sensor curvatore for all cameras or the third party lens makers would be out of the game, if Pentax, Canon etc. would use differently curved sensors. That sure is a idea, which would appeal to some sales paople at the camera makers, but basically, it would be a big blow to the overall market.
On top, I think, that correcting for the micro löens-related problems is more esily done via in-camera post-processing - as some cameras already do - and/or by optimizing the geometry of the micro lenses.
Ofcourse I agree, that a curved sensor would be ideal, because it deals with a couple of optical problems, from field curvatore over vignetting right to distortion - but applying that to a camera system with interchangeable lenses is really a very big problem.
Ben