This does actually look like it's useable for general photography, not just microscopes.
For some time I've been thinking that digital cameras must have an unrealized potential. For instance, the human eye has aberrations that increase the depth of field, and jerks around a lot even when looking at one thing. And we see processed images. I thought if aberrations, contrast, and other characteristics of a lens were known and communicated to the camera, then barrel distortion could be straightened out in software, and so on. Then maybe lenses with new capabilities could be made, like 20x zooms that produce nice pictures, or at least much cheaper lenses could be made. Or a different kind of image stablization; take a 1/4 second video clip of a moving object, identify all the edges (like legs) and distort the images in software so the legs all fall onto the midpoint. It might give screwy looking results sometimes, but it also might give well exposed images that would never be more than a blur when taken by traditional methods. Or if not that, it seemed digital must have possibilities that are being completely overlooked because people still think of them as basically film cameras with a CCD instead of film. Wavefront imaging is a new one for me, but it looks like the same concept. It seems you can get a greatly increased depth of field without stopping down the aperture, but by matching lens to the entire system and processing the image.
