On Thursday, July 13, 2017 at 9:38:43 PM UTC-4, Helpful person wrote:
On Thursday, July 13, 2017 at 3:12:30 PM UTC-4, Quadibloc wrote:
On Thursday, July 13, 2017 at 1:08:08 PM UTC-6, Quadibloc wrote:
On Wednesday, July 12, 2017 at 9:41:01 PM UTC-6, Quadibloc wrote:

Of course, perhaps eventually inexpensive manufacturing techniques will be
found, such as SOI where the insulating substrate can be heated enough to make
it malleable without disturbing the delicate microcircuitry on its surface.

An even more sensible method:

Do SOI, but have the insulator already in a curved shape before starting.

The optics for going from the mask to the substrate, after all, can *also* be
designed to have curvature of field! And then there are no problems with
deformation at all.

Of course, that requires an investment in a very specialized production line.
SONY bent their sensor after the fact, as this article notes -

https://www.engadget.com/2014/07/08/...curved-sensor/

so curved image sensors *are* already in the consumer area!

However, there's a trivial technique which achieves almost the same result:
place a plano-convex lens immediately in front of the flat image sensor.. The
extra thickness of glass in the center makes the middle of the sensor seem
farther away, but because it is so close to the image plane, it doesn't do much
to change the magnification and so on.

This is a well-known technique, often used.

John Savard

It's not a trivial technique. Using a fiield flattened introduces several problems. It increases the angle of incidence of the principal ray at the image plane. This reduces both MTF and image illumination.

www.richardfisher.com

The whole idea behind improving digital imaging was concentricity of rays, so they avoided hitting the "walls" of the pixels of the sensor. So, you have to deal with micro lenses on the sensors on top of each pixel and how light interacts with them. Obviously, film grains never had this issue.