
Show me your holes!
Uh huh... I can *totally* see that becoming a marketing phrase on everyone's lips.
Samsung’s Display business has claimed the mantle as the maker of the world’s most advanced holes. The company today announced that independent science safety company “UL” has just “verified its new OLED hole display as having image quality low in color deviation in terms of ‘hole area clarity,’ providing a balanced level of …
Less practical than you'd think. Pencils shed graphite dust, and in not-so-extreme cases they can shed pretty large chunks. Graphite is highly conductive, and if that stuff gets in your instrument panel, you're going to have problems. Aside from that, the entire pencil is flammable as well, which isn't a great property in the oxygen-rich atmosphere of a space capsule.
It's all a myth, anyway. The "space pen" was invented by a chap called Paul Fisher, who saw a tremendous sales and marketing opportunity when the space race was kicking off, and invented a nifty pressurised pen system that had a multitude of uses beyond just working in microgravity. The US and the Soviet space programs both bought his pens in the late 60s, because they didn't want to use pencils.
The basic universal problem with all smart phone cameras the quality of the lens. There's a very good reason why an even moderate quality SLR lens has ten or more elements and is quite large (massive by smart phone standards). You just can't do it in a few millimetres on each axis.
It's worthy of note that those huge iphone landscape adverts on the London tube posters are described as something like "enhanced for reproduction" in tiny print on one corner. But I suppose the quality expectations of a "selfie" are not that high.