Metalenz Buys PxE Imaging, Targets Bayer Filter's 60 Percent Light Loss

Metalenz has acquired Israeli startup PxE Imaging, and the deal puts a direct challenger to the Bayer color filter — the light-absorbing layer on virtually every digital sensor sold today — under one roof with metasurface optics already shipping at mass-market scale. Terms were not disclosed.

The core claim is a number working photographers should sit up for. PxE's Holocoder "eliminates the need for the Bayer filter and sorts light without absorption, increasing the light delivered to a standard image sensor by 2.5x," according to Metalenz's press release. For context, Metalenz says a Bayer filter absorbs roughly 60% of the light reaching a sensor. That loss is the tax every color camera has paid for decades — the reason high-ISO noise exists at all.

What does the Holocoder actually do?

It's not just a brighter filter swap. The Holocoder "harnesses the wave nature of light to physically decode information such as wavelength and depth, enabling simultaneous capture of color and depth information in the same image with a single camera." Color and depth from one sensor, one lens, no absorption penalty.

PxE co-founder and CEO Yoav Berlatzky put it plainly: "We developed the Holocoder to capture information in light that conventional sensors discard or cannot see, giving cameras greater light sensitivity and the ability to capture color and depth together. Joining Metalenz gives us the manufacturing platform and commercial reach to bring this technology to everyday devices."

Shipped product or rumor? Here's the honest status

Right now, Metalenz cannot directly combine the Holocoder with its commercial metasurface optics — the two product lines don't yet merge. But PxE's technology could reach the market as soon as the end of next year, riding Metalenz's existing manufacturing capacity. Treat that as a target date, not a launch. No smartphone maker, camera maker or automotive customer has been named.

The strategic logic, per Metalenz co-founder and CEO Rob Devlin, is vertical integration from hardware to AI. "Metalenz has strategically expanded our IP from unique hardware to full-stack solutions co-designed with our metasurfaces," he said. "Owning hardware that brings new information to sensors is the real moat for differentiated AI models. Our combined capability with PxE extends that same principle across all of machine vision, so people and machines can see and understand more about the world without relying on heavy computation."

Devlin also told WIRED the incumbent smartphone players are fighting physics with software budgets. "Apple, Samsung, Google — everyone is fighting to improve the visible camera every year, right?" he said. "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 of the software into the world at it." He claims those companies pour hundreds of millions of dollars annually into computational fixes for information the filter already destroyed at capture.

Why it matters beyond phones

The immediate applications are small-camera domains: smartphones and autonomous vehicles, where a smaller sensor gathering 2.5x more light is a genuine engineering win. For dedicated camera systems, nothing changes yet — no large-format sensor partner has been announced, and the first products will target the visible-sensing and machine-vision markets Metalenz already serves.

The Bayer filter is a fifty-year-old design doing a job nobody has improved at scale. If PxE's claims survive real-world deployment — and the 2.5x figure is a manufacturer's number until independent testing exists — the low-light ceiling every photographer budgets gear against could move materially. Watch for named customers and shipping hardware by late next year.