A little weird that the entire article about this light field camera is basically a puff piece for your favourite gadget, the iPhone.

When the iPhone was released, it was 2G-only, had 0 apps and no app store, had no MMS/bluetooth or copy&paste and had absolutely no multi-tasking of 3rd party apps.

The iPhone 1 was a dumbphone. The only things it changed was forcing capacitive screens upon us. As this technology recently became viable, it was a natural progression. There was already a successful LG phone with a capacitive display so it wasn’t even original or something that ‘changed the industry’.

It’s more the media hype that has changed the industry. Something you won’t see with a light field camera.

When you first described the image sensor has having all those micro-lenses, my first thought was “that’s nearly how a hologram works”. Maybe that’s the next big leap for Lytro’s technology.

Just a little more post processing and it would shine that much more.
Imagine that every part of the image was in focus at the same time, printable, no fiddling with screens. If it could happen in real time, as in a video camera, with a very large depth of field it would be better.
Moveable focus is nice, but a bit arty for most people.

A solution without a problem. Sure it is nifty this technology, no doubt about that. But quite frankly my iPhone camera is doing well enough as it is. So is my digital SLR. Like has been said by other folks most of the pictures I take has a single point of view. I really don’t care about the glass of water in the foreground because well it is not part of the picture.

I also ask why should I buy this camera? Are there GPS coordinates? Can I easily upload to a website? Can I easily share? I think this camera is missing quite a few of the things that I now expect of a camera. Just having technology for the sake of technology reminds of 3d screens. Nice idea, but frankly just not worth it.

I thought the author was going to mention the low-resolution of Lytro images. The sensor is perhaps high-resolution, but eliminating the need to focus is paid for by dramatically lower resolution in the final product.

Not a bad article, but this guy is a bit hung up on apple. They should pay you if you’re going to advertise for them fanboy.

This complex lens system is a degradation, especially for geometry (read photogrammetry) use. The multiple lenses are harder to calibrate and keep in calibration (although no autofocus motor is a plus).

Unless these can be modelled somehow the ability to use these cameras for precision measurement use goes away. I guess you could always tack on a simple cellphone camera sensor sans autofocus to provide measurement capabilities.

Interesting piece, I’m not sure I agree that the iphone is the most transformative piece of consumer technology ever invented though !! More transformative than the PC, the television, the radio, the motor car, the light bulb? Umm, no I don’t think so. Not sure that Apples market cap really means much in particular, I remember once when AOL had a massive market cap too, and when other .com companies had market caps higher than Boeing !

One thing that confuses me about this camera, is why they didn’t use a form factor similar to that of a traditional camera? From the description of the technology it seems that would’ve been possible. I think the most likely future for this technology is that it is licensed to traditional camera manufacturers as opposed to them developing their own brand further, but I could be completely wrong on this.

Security video seems like the most viable commercial application for light field cameras. They could make it trivial for CSI-type “sharpen that image” work needed to make out someone’s facial features or car license plate number.

All this talk about changing history is great. I am in Mumbai, India and I went to the Lytro website to buy the camera and I was told that they do not ship outside the US. This is the first company in the world that does not ship outside the US. I thought the Internet made the world a global village, this company yet lives in the 20th century and wonder how they will change the future of cameras.

This seems to me to be productization of someone’s engineering ideas, without a good understanding of what users need or want. The product doesn’t have much practical utility for amateur early adopters, who get by just fine with fixed-focus or autofocus cameras . Professional and prosumer users almost always will want the superior optical performance (high resolution, high low-light sensitivity, low noise) that they can get with a physically large lens and sensor.

Light field cameras don’t have room for large lenses because both the sensor and the lens array have to be integral and small to be affordable, and the sensor of course also has to be small for the image-reconstruction optical physics to make mathematical sense for close-up shots. Because the sensor sub-areas are each quite small, the electronic physics results in mediocre resolution, low low-light sensitivity, and relatively high noise. Plus, optical companies still are finding ways of improving physically large lenses. Lens making is hugely more difficult at micro sizes. How will those lenses be made of the same optical quality as a single high quality lens of much larger size, and all exactly equal to each other?

So is there a real market for this product?

Sure, it’s an interesting technology. It might have some specialized uses. But, I don’t see that it solves a problem that actual camera users regard as high on their priority list, at a price that corresponds to that priority.

It ain’t Canon or Nikon either! It is a nice feauture. It can be of use if the image quality increases comparable to DSLRs. It is hard to do a depth-of-field bracketting from DLSRs. Looks like this can do that easily. But no use if the IQ is not good!