Slashdot Mirror
The Lytro Camera: Impressive Technology and Some Big Drawbacks
waderoush writes "The venture backers behind Lytro, the Silicon Valley startup that just released its new light field camera, say the device will upend consumer photography the way the iPhone upended the mobile business. This review takes that assertion at face value, enumerating the features that made the iPhone an overnight success and asking whether the Lytro camera and its refocusable 'living pictures' offer consumers an equivalent set of advantages. The verdict: not yet. But while the first Lytro model may not an overnight success, light field cameras and refocusable images are just the first taste of a revolution in computational photography that's going to change the way consumers think about pictures."
...that's going to change the way consumers think about pictures.
You're overestimating the average consumer: You believe they think prior to taking a picture. Having gone through enough cell phones left abandoned and dropped off at the lost in found before finally pressing 'm' in the phone book and calling their mom to say they lost their phone at my workplace... I can say with a fair degree of confidence most people take pictures of themselves, themselves with friends, more pictures of themselves and... (guys only)... pictures of inanimate objects that they never share or send to anyone. Ever. They're usually things like sign posts, car wheels (not actual cars, this would be too obvious), or random corners of buildings. From this, I can deduce that no actual thinking occurs for at least 95% of your everyday consumer's use of a camera.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
My first thought was that it could be great for video; no need to bother with precise focus while shooting if you can refocus when you edit. However, I'm guessing that it would require a huge data rate.
For those more interested in the technology, Ren Ng's thesis is available on Lytro's website (at the bottom of the "Science Inside" page). I read much of the thesis at it the other day after reading an article about the camera in the New York Times. It's a well written thesis and explains the technology in a few simple ways and more rigoroursly.
The best explaination to me was that the microlens array is effectively reimaging the lens onto a small array of pixels under each microlens. (The micolens is placed at the usual focal plane of the camera and the # of microlenses is what determines the resolution). Each pixel therefore sees only a small aperture of the lens. A small aperture gives a very large depth of field. You could just use one pixel under each microlens to create an image with a large depth of field, but you'd be throwing away a lot of light. You can be more clever, however, and reconstruct from all those small aperture images the image at any focus. At different focuses, the light from any location is shared among multiple microlenses. (i.e, it's out of focus - so it's blurred at the focal plane). However, it's not out of focus at the pixels, since remember each pixel only sees a small aperture and has a large depth of field. It's then just a matter of adding the right pixels together to create an in-focus image at any effective focal plane.
No, it's not, it's a useful word. It generally refers to a hobbyist who has the money/dedication to use genuinely professional equipment. For example, I don't play guitar for a living, but I do own a guitar and amplifier that would be more than suitable for a professional session musician. None of "amateur, hobbyist, enthusiast" conveys that. The marketing side of it is that companies have started to target those people as a sector in their own right, for instance Canon tend to make a range of cameras that have the same features as their high-end professional models, but with plastic rather than alloy bodies so not really suitable for a photojournalist in the field. Prosumer describes that quite nicely.