Focus on this

[chrisk]

Fascinating stuff.

A start-up called Lytro hopes to revolutionize photography by selling a camera later this year that lets people focus their images after the fact.

The technique used is called light-field photography, and it's been an active area of research for years in the optics realm. With it, lens and image sensor technology doesn't focus on a particular subject, but instead gathers light information from different directions; processing after the fact means different aspects of the scene can be recreated.

Lytro has been working on the technology for years--I interviewed Chief Executive Ren Ng three years ago when his start-up was called Refocus Imaging, and he began his research at Stanford well before that. But yesterday the company announced it plans to actually sell its first camera this year. Ng told All Things Digital's Ina Fried that the camera will be pocketable and "competitively priced," but was cagey on further details.

The promise of light-field photography is that people can fix or modify their photos afterward, for example focusing attention on a foreground subject by letting the background go blurry. Photographers have done this for years by setting a camera and lens for a particular depth of field and focusing, but Lytro argues its technology removes the technical challenges.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20073 ... z1Q3EzamLb

http://www.lytro.com/

[Alpha_7]

A non photography friend saw this and sent it to me, I enjoyed having a play with their interactive gallery. It's kind of cool. But I felt some of the areas still weren't sharp or as sharp as we'd expect them to be when shifting the focus around. (By that I mean the point were I asked it to focus, wasn't as sharp).

[aim54x]

I am keen to play with one...but at the end of the day I dont think I will be trading in my Nikon kit just yet

[Remorhaz]

I wonder how long it will be before they have a usable camera with resolutions above a quarter of a megapixel

[chrisk]

im more fascinated with the technology than anything else.

[surenj]

Wow This is amazing. Who knows, one day, we might take pictures very differently! I bet in the 70s no one could even imagine a 20 Mpix DSLR which also did HD video or Facebook.

[ATJ]

I bet in the 70s no one could even imagine a 20 Mpix DSLR which also did HD video or Facebook.

In the 70s we couldn't care!

[surenj]

I wonder about file size.

[Murray Foote]

Not just file size, resolution. It takes a 16MP capture to get a 90KP image, so the final image has a resolution corresponding to about 0.5% of the capture resolution.

I'm sure they'll have a version of it in no time that delivers a 24MP output image, they just have to develop a cheap compact 4,300MP sensor first. In the meantime, their forthcoming product will be a digicam with modestly sized output for web display.

When, a week or two later they deliver their 4,300MP DSLR (or maybe it will take them longer), it will offer an enticing possibility of extracting the ultimate set of derived images for focus stacking in a conventional image or print.

I noticed, too, that one of their sample images has significant ghosting from bright objects behind foreground objects. There may be some constraints with these images that don't apply to conventional images.

[Murray Foote]

It seems you don't need to wait. Already available with a range of very stylish pocket cameras (depending on the size of your pockets), probably based on the concept of a collision between a wheat silo and a warehouse. Price on application, which probably means it's incredibly cheap and they just want to temper the demand: http://www.raytrix.de/index.php/models.html

... and up to a massive 3MP.

[surenj]

Interesting. Thanks for the link Murray.