Are you kidding me?!?! Change focus AFTER you shoot?

[alex]

Just saw this today...a new kind of sensor developed by Lytro (never heard of this company before) that records the "entire field of light" (whatever that means), allowing you to change the focus of the shot in post-processing if you missed the mark the first time!


On Yahoo news...


http://news.yahoo.com/s/digitaltrends/20110622/tc_digitaltrends/lytrothecamerathatcouldchangephotographyforever





And the company website...


http://www.lytro.com/





What do you think? Just another way to take the skill of photography out of the picture (pun!) or a useful tool that you would be grateful to have?


Not sure how I feel about it, other than that it can't possibly be cheap.


Thoughts?


alex

[Tim]

From cnn.com


"...uses multiple internal lenses to capture much more light than a normal camera, at more than one angle."


So I guess if you want to use this you have to ditch SLR all together. That

[alex]

As I

[neuroanatomist]

I'm sure the technology is not a gimmick (see also theother thread on this topic). But, there's a long way to go between great idea from doctoral work and marketable product. Generally speaking, good scientists make bad CEOs. I worked for one several years ago - a brilliant scientist (he's actually turned down three different US presidental administration offers to head up the NIH), he decided to take a great idea and start a biotech company, which subsequently folded. There are success stories out there, too, though - the lab in which I did undergraduate research (at Cal, btw - Go Bears!) had a postdoc with a great idea, who built that idea into a biotech company, Affymetrix, that is the dominant player in gene expression analysis (and currrently has a $0.5B market cap).


So, hopefully this technology makes it to the marketplace - but as of now, the website is primarily hype, and looks like a VC teaser (i.e. something to generate buzz - which it has - and more importantly, venture capital funding).

[tkerr]

This has been a topic of discussion around the web for a while now. Here are a couple of links discussing technologies for achieving this.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/23/adobe-shows-off-plenoptic-lenses-that-let-you-refocus-an-image-a/


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/22/technology/22camera.html?_r=1


I personally don't see it available to the general public for a few years down the road yet, and then when it does make it to the market, it's going to be a while before it is reasonably affordable to the masses.

[jimr]

Once the company proves the tech works in their own production line expect it to be heavily licensed to all the other game players - huge demand for this in the cell phone market.

[alex]

That's a good point, Jim. I could see this being used in cell phones like crazy. I don't see how they wouldn't be able to incorporate it into DSLR cameras, though, especially once they get the image quality improved (if that's possible given the gaps btwn the microlenses).


I got partway through this guy's dissertation last night, and it's a pretty interesting read. I figure some of you guys might enjoy it as well. Here's the link to it if you're interested:


http://www.lytro.com/renng-thesis.pdf


alex

[HDNitehawk]

I went to Lytro's website.


I clicked on the sample picture page, it was a dead page.


I clicked on the "reserve camera" link and it was dead.


I clicked on the "how does it work" link and it was dead. (which must mean it doesn't work)


Not promising. Looks like hype. Considering the 3-4 billion Canon puts in R&D, and what Nikon probably puts in R&D most likely if this company really has a worthy product they will get scooped up by one of the big companies.

[neuroanatomist]

What browser/version, Rick? All of those links work fine for me with Safari 5 (you need to enter an email address for 'reserve a camera', but even nowhere@loopback.com works). Lots of Flash and Javascript on the site, though.

[HDNitehawk]

What browser/version, Rick? All of those links work fine for me with Safari 5 (you need to enter an email address for 'reserve a camera', but even nowhere@loopback.com works). Lots of Flash and Javascript on the site, though.

Latest version of IE on the computer at work.


I just got home and it works fine on Safari.....maybe I should post this in the Mac Vs.... thread [:P]


After reading it on Safari, it just appears to be hype.