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Thursday, October 20, 2011

Lytro: The Future of Photography?

Ever found that you had to throw away  (ok lah, delete) a photo because you found it out of focus?

Ever wanted to taken a photo and said, "Wouldn't it be nice to see it from different focus points?" but you can't two identical shots coz your subject is not stationary?

Well then, your dream isn't too far away from reality.

Enter: Lytro.

The premise of this camera is simply to answer the two questions above by creating what they call "Living Pictures".

Very, very promising. The first version of this camera is akin to cameras 70 years ago, it's a box. Ok, it's a pretty looking rectangular box. It looks like a desktop speaker, if you ask me, and you will look weird trying to take a photo with it.
Camera or speaker?
Camera or errr???

Once you take a photo, you can upload it to Facebook or view it from their viewer (presumably, since it ain't a JPEG file). The interesting thing is that you can in real time pick any point in the picture and it will automatically focus to that point. The narrow depth of field is made available due to the built in lens with fixed aperture of f2. But the magic is how you can change the focus at any point in the photo. While this is really great, there is a long way to go before we can drop all our camera gears and go head on towards this camera.

1. There is no way to get the photo to increase depth of field, such as when you want to take a landscape
2. Lens itself is a 8x zoom lens (with no specified focus length on the website). There is no way of taking wider or more telephoto shots beyond that 8x zoom.
3. Sample photos displayed shows that the IQ is not great. You can only zoom a little and you definitely can't pixel peep. Not sure if it is even print worthy.

I won't repeat the science behind the product, but I've read some other articles which say that this camera will eliminate the need for interchangable lenses. I have a feeling that is not true. I believe that one day, this camera sensor can replace our DSLR sensors. Different lenses will still be required for different focal lengths and intrinsic values such as contrast and bokeh.

Currently priced from $499 a piece, it's not too expensive for a novel product.

Don't get me wrong, I think this is really, really exciting technology. I will never have to blame my camera AF or my eyes for not being able to focus properly! My wife would love it so much! Happy man I will be! But I guess it's just not for us who still want quality photos and "normal" looking cameras. :)

I think we are living in really exciting times here! Go take a look at Lytro here.

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