Why are modern 50mm lenses so damned complicated?
What <i>I</i> don't understand isn't the design of the lenses, which are chasing ever-tightening windows of precision in a competetive market with high margins and discriminating consumers.  Of course they're going to be overdesigned.<p>What gets me is that lens distortion is a fully reversible convolution.  It's not lossy, at all.  Or rather, it's only lossy in the sense that the existing quantization in the sensor is already lossy: pixel boundaries, spectrum of the color sensors, etc... all have straightforward analogs in both space and frequency domain.<p>Basically: why hasn't someone come out with a camera with a junky single-piece lens and a fancy image processing backend and won the market?