Originally posted by Digitalis 
Not a chance, the aberrations and flare from a lens like this would not be appealing at all. Anamorphic lenses have visually distracting flare patterns and a lens designed like this would look even stranger.
People do love the look though, and go through great lengths and expenses to get it. I'd like to shoot anamorphic lenses too... makes the photo or video look more expensive.
Originally posted by Fogel70 I don't think there is much advantage in using this type of design for large sensor cameras.
When using lenses with focal length of a few millimeters in a smartphone this design might have a few advantages, FI more compact design as it's difficult to fit all lens elements necessary for a traditional zoom lens when focal length is this short.
On much longer focal length used in cameras with large sensors, this design might not give any advantage as there is much more space for lens elements. For these camera the lateral moving lens elements might instead add more to the size of the lens.
Mh... you're probably right. I think the main advantage is that you don't need a long camera module... traditional cameras with zoom lenses, even when the sensor is small, are rather thick. In smartphones, where 1 cm thickness is already considered obese (heck, some phones are now <5mm thick!) such a thick camera module is just not possible.
There's a new Asus smartphone that mentions this company and that has a 3x optical zoom, though the schematics of the camera module they published is much more traditional. They follow the Sony T series of cameras, which uses mirrors or prisms to redirect the light. That way the camera module can be as long as the phone is wide... plenty of space for lenses etc. I'm actually quite excited about that phone. My mother has another Asus smartphone, and the photos from the camera are actually quite good. The focus is usually spot on, the photos are sharp enough, and despite using a rather average sensor the software makes the best of it. There's some grain to the photo which actually looks pleasant (it's not over de-noised), and at least until ISO 500 the photos are quite nice and color noise free, colors are ok in general, dynamic range is acceptable, though there are places where the camera is trying to recover stuff that isn't there, particularly in blue skies. It does a good job. There's even a pretty decent night mode that results in some good low light performance by binning pixels... so you can still take photos when other phones see nothing. Give it a better sensor like found in my Xiaomi, and a nice 3x optical zoom... really, who needs a point & shoot anymore? The quality is more than close enough, and the convenience...
It's a good thing Ricoh Pentax didn't show any point & shoots at CES.
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