Metalenz Buys PxE to Kill the 50-Year-Old Camera Filter Draining Your Photos

Metalenz has acquired Israeli startup PxE Holographic Imaging, whose microscopic "HoloCoder" layer can let a smartphone camera sensor collect up to a claimed 2.5 times more light than today's hardware — by replacing a color filter that has barely changed since 1974.

The deal, whose financial terms were not disclosed, targets one of the oldest bottlenecks in consumer imaging. Every time you take a photo, your phone's sensor captures light and converts it into electrical signals to build a digital image. But the Bayer filter — a red, green, and blue layer sitting above the sensor that adds color to images — absorbs and wastes around 60 percent of the incoming light before it ever reaches the sensor. To make a red pixel, the filter simply blocks and discards blue and green light.

The HoloCoder takes the opposite approach. Instead of absorbing light, the microscopic structure sits directly on top of the image sensor and diffracts light — bending the light waves and redirecting them toward the sensor's pixels rather than throwing them away.

What does 2.5x more light actually buy you?

Light-gathering ability is the currency of camera quality. A sensor that collects 2.5 times more light could dramatically improve a smartphone's low-light photography and dynamic range, according to the company's claims.

Night-time video capture stands to gain the most. In high-contrast scenes — like taking a selfie in front of a bright window — a HoloCoder-equipped sensor can capture more light and better re-create the scene without blowing out highlights or drowning shadows in noise.

There's a secondary benefit too. The HoloCoder can capture 3D depth information at the same time it captures the image. Most smartphones currently rely on secondary cameras, dedicated depth sensors, or AI guesswork to estimate the distance between camera and subject — the data that powers features like portrait mode. Merging light sensing and depth sensing into a single layer would simplify the electronics on the back of a phone, saving space and processing power.

Why the acquisition fits Metalenz

The Boston-based company launched publicly in 2021 and pioneered the commercialization of metasurfaces — flat-lens systems patterned with nanostructures that bend light. Metasurfaces reduce the need for multiple lens elements stacked over a camera sensor while capturing more light. Metalenz has shipped more than 300 million of these metasurface optics to consumer devices to date.

Its technology can also capture polarization data, and the company is working with Qualcomm on Polar ID, a facial biometric authentication system for Android designed to rival Apple's Face ID. Polar ID is expected to arrive on consumer devices at the end of 2027.

Rob Devlin, Metalenz's CEO and cofounder, says PxE's approach mirrors his own company's: patterning microscopic structures directly onto an image sensor to unlock light data that conventional camera systems throw away.

"Apple, Samsung, Google—everyone is fighting to improve the visible camera every year, right?" Devlin says. "A lot of what they're doing is investing hundreds of millions of dollars into software to try to somehow improve it, but the downside of that is that once information is lost when you're absorbing all of that light, you can't really buy it back, even if you're throwing all the software into the world at it."

One sensor to rule them all?

PxE's technology isn't on the market yet, but Metalenz has already built the infrastructure around it: a supply chain, an image pipeline, and machine learning algorithms trained to exploit these new data streams. Devlin believes the HoloCoder will fit neatly into Metalenz's platform and "completely disrupt" the visible sensing market.

One technical wrinkle: the HoloCoder functions as a diffractive optic, not a true metasurface. But Devlin says Metalenz has already replicated the technology in the lab using its own metasurface optics.

"It's really then bringing all of that information together through a single approach," Devlin says. "We would do a metasurface design where now from a single image sensor, you're getting all of the information that is in light: You're getting polarization, you're getting color without filtering, and you're getting this depth channel. It's like the one sensor to rule them all."

For now, the two technologies will remain separate products for different markets. In the long term, they could fuse into a single Metalenz system. Devlin expects PxE's HoloCoder to appear in consumer electronics as early as late 2027 or early 2028.

What about robots and self-driving cars?

Metalenz frames this as more than a smartphone story. Simplifying and shrinking camera hardware with metasurface optics was the company's first phase; the real goal, Devlin says, has always been unlocking the new information channel — something he believes could be transformational for autonomous robots and autonomous vehicles. Instead of large modules with multiple sensors and computationally expensive chips aligning spatial data in real time, a single-sensor system could do the job in a smaller, cheaper design using less computing power.

Not everyone buys that argument.

"It is a real problem in the sense that, in the color filter, you lose a lot of light," says Arka Majumdar, who researches low-energy opto-electronics at the University of Washington. He notes that other industry heavyweights, including Samsung and a startup called Eyeo, have been actively researching their own alternatives to Bayer filters, known as "color routers."

Majumdar agrees that ditching the filter can meaningfully improve smartphone photography in low light. But he's skeptical the technology can revolutionize robotics and self-driving cars. Unlike phones, vehicles have plenty of space to mount stereo cameras or lidar. Their bottleneck isn't low light or image clarity — it's the computational power needed to make split-second decisions.

"In fact, arguably, if you get better data, it's actually worse," Majumdar says.

Why this matters now

The smartphone industry's camera arms race has largely shifted to software, with Apple, Samsung, and Google pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into computational photography each year. Metalenz's bet is that physics beats processing: recover the light at the sensor, and the software problem shrinks. With Samsung and Eyeo pursuing similar "color router" approaches, the 50-year reign of the Bayer filter — and the design assumptions built on it — now faces its most serious challenge yet.