Joshooah Lovenkraft

Lytro, the company that has harnessed "light field" technology for cameras has finally revealed their consumer level product today in what some are calling a significant leap forward in photography. What this camera does is create a "living picture" meaning that you can take a picture without worrying about focus. When viewing it on your computer, you can simply click anywhere on the image and choose the point of focus and change it as often as you like.

It's interesting new technology but not something I'm going to run out and buy. I'd love to play with one and can see some intriguing uses for them but it seems a bit gimmicky. The actual design of the camera was a well kept secret until today and is radically different from anything that is currently out there. You can pre-order one today but they won't be shipped until after the holidays with prices ranging from $399-$499 usd.

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Nibb Tardis

There isn't much information about resolution, but I've seen figures like 256x256, and the "screen" is said to be 128x128. A bit expensive for that kind of performance.

Joshooah Lovenkraft

Ya I found it a bit hard to understand and compare to current technology because they use a new term called "mega-rays" that means the sensor collects 11 million rays of light with every shot. What this means ... I dunno lol.

Lytro unveils radical new camera design | Deep Tech - CNET News

Then there's the vocabulary gap. The Lytro cameras gather 11 megarays worth of data, Ng said. "The sensor collects 11 million rays of light at every shot," he explained. That's a lot of rays, but it'll be awhile before anyone has an idea what kind of image quality that enables, the way people have at least a vague understanding of megapixels today for conventional cameras.

McPhaughan

I wonder if this will challenge the current time-consuming "focus stacking" approach (also called DOF stacking or Deep Focus Fusion) to getting enhanced depth of field in macro photography?

I guess you'd need software that effectively clicks on every point of the image and combines the sharp images from each point into a combined image that is in focus everywhere?

Joshooah Lovenkraft

I've heard of some scientific interest using this technology for things like evaluating histological slides where the high magnification lenses generally have a very shallow dof (in the order of microns) so a light field type sensor would eliminate having to move the sample up and down in order to focus on a specific area.

Joshua Nightshade

Woah that is cool. And $400 for a camera is really not that expensive at all. The Sony camera I bought before I went to China was $600.

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Imnotgoing Sideways

Dude... You're not supposed to buy electronics ~BEFORE~ going to China. (O.o)

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Joshua Nightshade

Yeah you are. The stuff sold within China is what didn't pass QA to be sent to white people countries.

Imnotgoing Sideways

QA... My favorite department of any manufacturer. It's where we put the most deluded people to make them think they're doing something seriously technical and have them inspect for surface scratches all day. XD

Void

Recently ran across these myself... they're bloody amazing and I hope the tech makes it's way into other more feature filled models soon.

apparently you can flatten the focus (just like a normal CCD does), but that's not the cool part... since it's capturing full DoF information, it's actually a single lens 3D image, albeit with limited viewing angle. add progrssive scanning and it could become an extremely cheap 3D modeler with texture information embedded (currently it's a texture mapper with some 3D information embedded)

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