It's not about the sensor, it's about the target

Terry Tao just wrote an entry in his blog trying to explain compressed sensing using the lens of the one-pixel camera from Rice. It's been my experience that the compressed sensing results are so unusual in terms of engineering, that, as proved by the length of Terry's post, there is a lot of explaining to do. On top of it, the use of the wording "compressed sensing" or "compressive sampling" or "compressive sensing" automatically gets engineers to think of compression as implemented in the JPEG/JPEG2000 sense (transform coding), so much of the explanation on compressed sensing goes toward explaining why this is strictly not that (transform coding). So while most people's question is whether this new type of camera change the digital world, it does not come accross that the one of the force of the technique is the tremendous simplification and robustness of detection algorithms. This is not trivial as image processing always involved a lot of parameter tweaking in order to obtain "the best result". It should help.