Lytro Illum Light-Field Camera Lets You Refocus Pictures Later

Iddo Genuth writes "Earlier today Lytro introduced a new light-field camera called Illum. This is the second camera with this innovative refocusing technology from the California based company founded in 2006. The new camera is a more advanced version of the first camera introduced in 2012. It has a much larger sensor with four times the resolution (Lytro still uses the term megarays instead of megapixels), a much larger and longer zoom lens with a f/2 constant aperture and of course the ability to refocus after you take a picture (the new Illum can refocus on many more points in the image compared to the older version). Users will also have more control of the camera, a larger screen, and the ability to create regular JPEG images or videos made from the refocused images they capture."

Comments

IIIum?

[EmagGeek]

Is that IIIum, Illum, or IlIum?

The font slashdot uses makes it impossible to tell.

Re:IIIum?

[cruff]

Is that IIIum, Illum, or IlIum?

The font slashdot uses makes it impossible to tell.

Quite, but feel free to override their fonts to make it obvious. :-) I really hate sites that think setting a small font size is the right thing to do, and always have the minimum font size override turned on.

Re:IIIum?

[Anonymous Coward]

|||um, obviously.

Re:IIIum?

[Ambvai]

You must be the guy who read off my hotel confirmation to me...

Re:IIIum?

[BattleApple]

Illum

Meh

[vadim_t]

It's mostly a solution in search of a problem.

Photographers choose what to focus on very intentionally, it rarely makes sense to focus on anything else. Of course it's possible to misfocus, but in that case it makes no sense to let the user play with it.

It's still going to be low res, because you get a small fraction of the "megarays" the sensor provides. The spec for this camera was 40, IIRC, so it might get around 4MP, which can't really compete with a modern DSLR. While resolution isn't everything, having some margin for cropping and large prints is a very good thing.

The control for the interactive photos is still clunky. I can't find a way to for instance get the whole image in focus, though that should be possible. It does it while changing perspective.

It doesn't fix the other problem that leads to blurriness -- camera shake. It's all well and good to be able to refocus, but most people learn to focus right pretty fast. The problem is with low light environments, and this isn't going to save you if you handhold and shoot at 1/10.

The sample images still looks low res and blurry.

It costs $1600 and doesn't seem to have interchangeable lenses -- what, are they insane?

Overall interesting toy, but doesn't seem to have a practical use.

Re:Meh

[vadim_t]

- Yes it is $1600 and 4MP. Do you know how much the first DSLRs were with only 1MP? Technology evolves.

The problem is that physics get in the way of resolution increases, and the best modern DSLRs already have a sensor that can out-resolve most lenses.

Which means that a Lytro style camera is going to necessarily sacrifice quality.

You can make a larger sensor, but that costs serious $$$. This thing is in the price range of a full frame camera. If I'm guessing right, to compete in quality with a normal one it'd have to go with a medium format sensor, and those start at around $10K.

- Why do you need interchangeable lenses when you can focus on or apply lens effects on whatever you want after the fact? You would not care about lenses with this kind of technology at all - in fact, the elimination of lenses means this technology could result in large cost savings over the long haul.

Because lenses have nothing to do with focusing? All lenses can focus at all ranges. You can't put a f/1.4 on this for shallower depth of field and better low light performance, or a 10mm wide angle, or a fish eye, or a better telephoto lens, or a tilt/shift for architecture.

It could however be very cool for macro, but oddly enough they don't seem to be hurrying to demonstrate that. Which is a pity -- extreme macro is a huge pain to focus, and that's the one area where this thing could show some promise.

Re:Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

In a fast-paced environment like a concert or sporting event, the ability to literally point and click, and pull the best shots later, is a fantastic advancement.
I love my first gen Lytro. I've gotten some amazing shots from it.

Don't knock it until you've tried it.

Re:Meh

[nine-times]

It's mostly a solution in search of a problem.

I think you're right that most people haven't been searching for this kind of camera, but I think you could have made the same argument about digital cameras in the first place, as well as computers in general. Things were just fine before. Professionals who were used to doing things the "normal" way saw them as more trouble than they're worth. They were expensive and had technical shortcomings when compared to the conventional solution.

However, it allows you to do something new that you couldn't do before. I'd say there's a good chance the technology will be refined and you'll see this sort of thing become cheaper and better. People will find cool and interesting applications. Something neat will probably come of this.

Re:Meh

[Jeremy Erwin]

The Chicago Sun-Times decided to replace its photographers with iphones-- the result was notably less dramatic photos. I'm not sure what became of that experiment, but the Illum might be more useful than an iphone, as a trained photo editor could take the raw illum files gathered by print reporters and refocus them appropriately. I'm not sure that this would end up being ethical, though.

Re:Meh

[ceoyoyo]

No, you can't. The simplest tradeoff that you might switch lenses for is aperture versus focal length. A larger aperture is good for low light. A longer focal length is good for things that are far away. You can fake a longer focal length by cropping your picture, but that reduces resolution (something this camera already has a problem with) and requires a lens with much higher resolving power (which is ALSO something this camera has a problem with).

Re:Meh

[NIK282000]

The resolution at this point doesn't matter, this is a demo product that will only by bought by future investors and camera heads (quite possibly myself included). The
rest of your lens woes don't really apply with a plenopitc camera, the DOF is calculated when the image is made, if they can get DOF with unlimited depth they can
get ultra thin just the same way. They also boast that you can use lenses with no aspherical elements which means making addon lenses would be very cheap on
future versions of this camera. A tilt lens is not required with a plenoptic camera, it captures all parts in focus and then calculates the distance and angle you pick for
a plane of focus, you could even have a calculated "surface of focus" that is wavy or bent.
 
If they make enough on this one their next camera should be photographer's dream.

Re:Meh

[bws111]

You seem to be confusing lenses and filters. Lenses are not used to 'apply distortions' (although a side effect of many lenses is distortion). Lenses are used to control what fills the frame of the picture.

I'll give you an example. Suppose you are on the sidelines at a football game, and want to take some pictures. One picture might be of what your eye sees - a good portion of the stands on the other side of the field, grass between you and the players, and the players. A better picture may be of only the player controlling the ball. A different picture may want to show mostly the stands, to show the size of the crowd.

A point and shoot camera, or a camera with a 'normal' lens is going to take the first picture. A telephoto lens would take the second picture (you could zoom in and get just the players face, including the sweat dripping from his hair), and a wide angle lens would take the third picture.

Now, why can't this camera elimate those lenses? Well, suppose you have a 10MP camera. In the wide-angle shot, the players face probably takes up .1% of the frame. If you are using all 10MP to capture the wide angle shot, your players face only uses about 10K of the pixels. If you try to blow the players face up to full-frame you have an extremely blocky picture with no detail at all. On the other hand, if you want to the players face to occupy 10MP, you need to capture 10 GIGA pixels in your wide angle shot.

Re:Meh

[lgw]

Well put, but don't forget "gather more light". The reason long lenses tend to be big lenses is to increase the area you're gathering light from. The smaller and more distant^2 your field of view, the less light you have to work with. A face at 100 yards is going to need a large lens surface to give the electronics something they can see.

Still hoping they make a movie camera

[Thagg]

For still photography, focus isn't a terribly hard problem to solve. Autofocus works, and DSLRs let you compose, focus, and shoot manually as well. Easy peasy.

On the other hand, for movies shot using large-format sensors, focus is a huge issue. The amount of work spent following focus on a movie is significant, and it fails more often than you might think. Modern lenses are incredibly sharp, but they have such a tiny range that is in perfect focus that they are hard to use. Admittedly, the people who use these cameras and lenses are professionals with years or decades of experience, and they do well... ...But -- if we could focus our shots after the fact, it would be a true game changer for movie making. We could chose just what part of the scene should be in focus, and change that throughout the shot easily. Yes, this moves yet another part of the movie making process into post, but that's not a bad thing. As other people have suggested at other fora, editing/coloring/framing and visual effects are all done in post, and it helps make better movies. This would help too. Having the depth maps automatically generated would make visual effects easier and better as well.

I recognize that the amount of processing that goes on to make these images makes a motion picture camera a challenge, and the number of high-end motion picture cameras is probably a tenth of a percent of the DSLRs that are made, at most. Still, we could just capture the 40 MRays and do the processing later; storage and networks are getting faster and larger all the time.

Come on, Lytro! Make it happen!

Re:Still hoping they make a movie camera

[AK Marc]

Then they could finally do 3D right. I hate 3D movies because movies like Avatar make me ill. They are much more enjoyable in 2D. Why? Because directors (even 3D ones) still think in 2D. The scenes where the director has foreground shrubbery to help set setting and such, the plants are out of focus because the focus range is so small, but jumping out at you because they are closer. For 3D, if you are using 3D for depth, not just an occasional shark-jumping-out-of-the-screen moment, everything should be in focus. Let the 3D provide the depth, and let the viewer selectively focus. But forcing us to look at the actors because they are the only thing in focus, while forcing us to look at blurry plants because they are jumping out at us will always get a poor result.

3D will never look right if the same movie is watchable in 2D. But since everything is dual-D, none will be right for both. And that's a director problem.

Re:Still hoping they make a movie camera

[JerryLove]

For still photography, focus isn't a terribly hard problem to solve. Autofocus works, and DSLRs let you compose, focus, and shoot manually as well. Easy peasy.

Depends on what you are shooting and what you are shooting with. Bird moving through foliage at low F value? AF is likely to grab foliage. Something really close to camera and moving randomly? That can be a problem too. Baby waving arms... make sure you get focus to the face: AF (esp phase-focus) is likely to get the nearest object rather than the correct one. Contrast focus (and phase focus on-sensore, as with Canon 70D) can add face / eye detect, but (except the 70D) at the cost of speed (so moving objects are a problem again).

Proprietary image format

[gerddie]

I was considering getting the first version of their camera, but they use a proprietary image format for the original data and requests to open it are unanswered so far. Not even a SDK is provided to access the original data even though it was promised. Kind of disappointing and enough reason for me not to buy.

Re:2D resolution

[ceoyoyo]

The megapixel figure is the comparable number. The Lytro not only has a Bayer filter, it also has another filter that uses multiple pixels to measure the direction of the light. So you take your raw sensor, that might capture 40 MP, divide that by whatever number you like for Bayerization to get colour, and divide that by some other number (about 10 for Lytro's products) for the directional sensing.

you're limited in what you can do in post

[Chirs]

The lens is F/2, so you can't get the equivalent brightness of an F/1.4 (though you might be able to get the depth of field in post-processing).

The lens is 30-255, which is pretty good range, but you can't swap it out to go wider/longer.

Tilt-shift type effects (angled focal plane) should be doable in post-processing, but it would depend if they've added that functionality to their software.