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Camera Lets You Shift Focus After Shooting
Zothecula writes "For those of us who grew up with film cameras, even the most basic digital cameras can still seem a little bit magical. The ability to instantly see how your shots turned out, then delete the ones you don't want and manipulate the ones you like, is something we would have killed for. Well, light field cameras could be to today's digital cameras, what digital was to film. Among other things, they allow users to selectively shift focus between various objects in a picture, after it's been taken. While the technology has so far been inaccessible to most of us, that is set to change, with the upcoming release of Lytro's consumer light field camera."
The sacrifice of resolution isn't really that big a concern. Consumer cameras have far more resolution than they need these days, as the almighty megapixel has been used as a marketing ploy even though increasing pixel density on the CCDs has led to lower image quality overall. My 10 year old 2Mpx Canon still takes better pictures than any of my wife's last 3 compact cameras (4, 5 and 8Mpx Nikon and Canons), especially in low light. I would go so far as to say it doesn't make sense to have go beyond much more than 4Mpx with lenses the size of compact cameras, as details will be lost due to lens quality long before the pixel count causes loss of detail.