New camera tech doesn't need focus anymore

[Cyradix]

Shoot First, Focus Later With Lytro’s New Camera Tech - Tomio Geron - Social Markets - Forbes

Next revolution in camera technology?
No need to focus anymore... just focus later

 

[caLLous]

I don't really *get* how it works but on the face of it it looks like another one of those gimmicks for compact cameras... sweep panoramas, smile detection (cringe), etc...

It's interesting though. No word on resolution of images, surely they would be mahoosive files at 15 or 20mp.

 

[dysfunction]

I don't think it's a "gimmick" as such because you take the photo and then on your PC "focus" it on the part of the picture that you want to be clear.

It sounds like a great piece of technology but then requires you to edit all your photos after you have taken them. Could be quite time consuming!

Still sounds like a superb leap forward though. you will never have any blurred pictures.

 

[eksdee]

Really interesting. I presume the camera musos who see pointing and clicking one hundred times and picking the best one out of the hundred as 'art' will eschew this as it 'devalues' their 'hard work', but for everyone else this could be a great development.

Another interesting thing the article mentions is the ability for this technology to take low light photos due to the amount of light it takes in.

It's interesting though. No word on resolution of images, surely they would be mahoosive files at 15 or 20mp.

In this modern era of 1tb+ hard-drives I don't see it being a massive problem though? Even for the average user. My parents' PC for example has a 250gb hard-drive that isn't even more than 20% full after years of use!

 

[caLLous]

Yeah as it stands at the moment the user just takes a photo and it is stored as a JPEG (probably, on a normal point'n'shoot camera) but if you take JPEGs with this camera you would lose the ability to refocus. So to retain that ability you would have to keep the original RAW (for want of a better name for their proprietary filetype) file from the camera and, depending on how it all works, these files could be huge.

I'm not bashing the tech I'm just curious as to how it works in real world situations (ie not some tech demo from a start-up, no matter how good the gaffer's dissertation was!).

 

[Reno]

In this modern era of 1tb+ hard-drives I don't see it being a massive problem though? Even for the average user. My parents' PC for example has a 250gb hard-drive that isn't even more than 20% full after years of use!

I don't think the HD space will be the problem, but rather how many photos you can store on the camera before it's filled up.

Danita

 

[Roo Stercogburn]

Really cool tech, it will be interesting to see the results when it hits the market and the reviews properly start coming in.

 

[caLLous]

I don't think the HD space will be the problem, but rather how many photos you can store on the camera before it's filled up.

Danita

Yeah, this, and also the ability of the tech to move the files between devices at an acceptable speed.

 

[eksdee]

Fair, but can't you get 5gb or so SD (or whatever) cards these days? When I used a digital SLR for taking reference photos for illustration work, for example, I always used the 'raw' function so I could have the highest possible resolution file as the images sometimes got used in books/magazines of reference photos for students and never had a problem with storing hundreds of photos.

Irrespective of all that, that isn't really the issue here so who cares - if they can develop this kind of technology I'm sure they can work out an efficient way of working with the files.

So will the new wave of deviantart 'artists' new thing be taking a picture and playing with the focus, rather than applying 15 photoshop filters to it then calling it their latest masterpiece?

 

[Tom]

I'm wondering if it uses some kind of three-dimensional sensor. A special lens would then project the image onto that sensor, but not in a traditional two-dimensional plane. I can't figure out in my head what's happening at the front of the lens though.

 

[caLLous]

This is a link to a pretty heavy pdf and a video from Mr Ng himself, linked from the wiki page for the Plenoptic camera.

Looks like lots and lots of microlenses...

A team at Stanford University used a 16 megapixel camera with a 90,000-microlens array (meaning that each microlens covers about 175 pixels, and the final resolution is 90 kilopixels) to demonstrate that pictures can be refocused after they are taken.

 

[Roo Stercogburn]

Might finally be the Blade Runner tech which everyone keeps getting excited about any time there's a leap in camera technology.

 

[Access Denied]

Sounds like an excuse to be lazy tbh...