• A Camera that couldn't care less about focus: Lytro
    13 replies, posted
[url=http://mashable.com/2011/06/22/lytro/]source[/url] [release]Remember cameras that would have to focus themselves before taking a snapshot? And how that could lose vital seconds, making a mockery of the term “point and shoot”? Oh, right — that would describe every digital camera currently on the market. But if one Silicon Valley startup has its way, the very idea of focusing, or adjusting light levels, or having to wait before you click the shutter, will be a relic of the early 21st century — along, perhaps, with photos that only exist in two dimensions. [url=http://www.lytro.com/about/index.html]Lytro[/url] is the brainchild of Dr. Ren Ng, a Stanford Ph.D whose dissertation on light-field technology five years ago was showered with awards. Now, with the help of $50 million in funding, most of it from Andreessen Horowitz, Ng has built a company that’s preparing to launch a focus-free digital camera later this year. The basic premise of Lytro’s technology is pretty simple: The camera captures all the information it possibly can about the field of light in front of it. You then get a digital photo that is adjustable in an almost infinite number of ways. You can focus anywhere in the picture, change the light levels — and presuming you’re using a device with a 3-D ready screen — even create a picture you can tilt and shift in three dimensions. (I got a demonstration of the camera’s 3-D photos on a laptop and was blown away.) You might think that this would produce unfeasibly large digital files, but Ng insists that the files will be roughly comparable to the average size of a digital photo today. The heavy lifting is being done by the camera’s on-board processors, he says. And because its light sensor is incredibly sensitive, you can capture low-light situations like restaurants a lot more easily — even without the flash. Although the camera itself isn’t due out until late 2011, Lytro on Tuesday unveiled [url=http://www.lytro.com/picture_gallery]a carousel of demonstration snapshots[/url] — all of them embeddable, available in Flash for the web and HTML5 for your smartphone. Here’s an example. Click anywhere on the picture to change the focus, double-click to zoom. [img]http://gyazo.com/fd651b8103786b0a281cff3955545b04.png[/img] Remind you of [url=http://mashable.com/tag/instagram/]Instagram[/url]‘s [url=http://mashable.com/2011/03/11/instagram-update-2/]tilt-shift feature[/url], perhaps? Sure — except when you realize that Instagram can only focus on one area of the screen at a time. See how the chain link fence snaps in and out of focus? That’s how you know it’s a picture with a whole lot of light field information in it. And the cost of this camera? Ng says it will be comparable to other consumer-priced digital cameras on the market. If the end result is anything like these demonstration photos, the $40 billion camera market is about to meet a whole lot of disruption.[/release] First of all, if you didn't, go to the damn [url=http://www.lytro.com/picture_gallery]gallery[/url] and [i]click on different parts of the picture[/i]. It refocuses. let that soak in alright, now first of all I'd like to call BS on it being true DOF, as that's just not how anything can work unless it literally takes a frame for every step of focus and just plays it like a movie when you shift around, but it says that photos won't be much larger than an average normal photo. Second, they say the sensor is really sensitive to low light. I assume this is going to result in your usual point and click cotton candy noise, and if you've seen the demo shots it's pretty apparent it's got a lot of chromatic abberation even towards the middle of the shots. (chain fence above is a prime example) Quite something regardless, but it's got me feeling wary.
If this hype is true, it's incredibly impressive technology. It could prove to be the ultimate experimentation camera, despite it's obvious flaws in quality. I also call bullshit on the picture size, it's going to be at least as big as a good quality RAW file.
I like how you can literally get a sense of depth to the image with how the move it around in this example video [url=http://allthingsd.com/20110621/meet-the-stealthy-start-up-that-aims-to-sharpen-focus-of-entire-camera-industry/]Here[/url]. It could easily flop as a lot of people with compact cameras would just retake the picture or if not badly out of focus they could just use it. If it does kick off they'll refine it in years to come. Not an easy task breaking into the photography game with a new product, but its certainly unique enough to stand out.
Wow, that's pretty neat. I'm glad I never got into photography otherwise I may find problems with this idea, but since I didn't this camera looks cool.
[QUOTE=MisterM;30644088]I like how you can literally get a sense of depth to the image with how the move it around in this example video [url=http://allthingsd.com/20110621/meet-the-stealthy-start-up-that-aims-to-sharpen-focus-of-entire-camera-industry/]Here[/url]. It could easily flop as a lot of people with compact cameras would just retake the picture or if not badly out of focus they could just use it. If it does kick off they'll refine it in years to come. Not an easy task breaking into the photography game with a new product, but its certainly unique enough to stand out.[/QUOTE] when he re-orients the picture and moves around slightly, I think I understand the system. It could be an array of smaller cameras in a circle, so that it understands the full depth and simulates its own aperture. It then overlays all of the data in one file, which divides itself into layered information so you can control the blur like Z-depth in 3D applications.
[QUOTE=daijitsu;30643429]alright, now first of all I'd like to call BS on it being true DOF, as that's just not how anything can work unless it literally takes a frame for every step of focus and just plays it like a movie when you shift around, but it says that photos won't be much larger than an average normal photo. [/QUOTE] a while ago i found a talk that amongst other things, included a camera that very quickly moved the sensor while the shutter was open so it went from the closest focus distance to infinity in one shot basically. at first the entire image was blurry, but then it was processed using deconvolution. they included a demonstration, where they took a photo with this system through a telescope, with a guy quite close and objects far behind him all being in focus at the end of the process. [editline]23rd June 2011[/editline] in fact if you have an hour to spare, here it is: [url]http://vimeo.com/5339102[/url] has a lot of other interesting cool shit, including images extracted from reflections on people's corneas in photos (including really old photos) csi-style i definitely recommend watching
[QUOTE=Uber|nooB;30645313]a while ago i found a talk that amongst other things, included a camera that very quickly moved the sensor while the shutter was open so it went from the closest focus distance to infinity in one shot basically. at first the entire image was blurry, but then it was processed using deconvolution. they included a demonstration, where they took a photo with this system through a telescope, with a guy quite close and objects far behind him all being in focus at the end of the process. [editline]23rd June 2011[/editline] in fact if you have an hour to spare, here it is: [url]http://vimeo.com/5339102[/url] has a lot of other interesting cool shit, including images extracted from reflections on people's corneas in photos (including really old photos) csi-style i definitely recommend watching[/QUOTE] Yeah, if this is based on that design, then to get different dof it could simply ignore certain pieces of information.
What if this becomes the ultimate photographer's tool? What would people think about it? Tbh I don't think I'd be too happy
I find it would be too gimmicky to be anything near useful to professionals. Sure it's fun and would be seen as a cute and original idea for a web gallery for a wedding or two, but the sheer requirement of having it sit in a flash gallery, on a 3D display or on the back of the camera and be interacted with severely limits its application and longevity. People buy wedding photos to remember the moment, to have something to look back on years later. Professional photography is only truly valuable in print.
[QUOTE=daijitsu;30647249]I find it would be too gimmicky to be anything near useful to professionals. Sure it's fun and would be seen as a cute and original idea for a web gallery for a wedding or two, but the sheer requirement of having it sit in a flash gallery, on a 3D display or on the back of the camera and be interacted with severely limits its application and longevity. People buy wedding photos to remember the moment, to have something to look back on years later. Professional photography is only truly valuable in print.[/QUOTE] I thought the point was that you wouldn't have to worry about focus when taking the photo, so you could adjust the focus later on the computer, then print. Am I missing something here?
indeed you can capture a single focal point then be done with it, but the thing is how it's done. Looking closely at the examples, it does seem to elude to the fact that it's multiple smaller, lower quality cameras taking the picture from a specific angle, creating a 3D image in which, depending on how the image is composited, different parts line up and focus. The problem with that is that you get some unnatural cross-hatched blur- [img]http://gyazo.com/847e878f0d558fa2baea6ab8e7930865.png[/img] -due to it being intermeshed yet focused points of data. Once it finishes refocusing it will blur it a little, but that's a huge gouge in possible resulting quality that honestly is way too much effort compared to just knowing what you want to focus on and taking a picture with a good camera in the first place.
ill just leave this here [media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oznHd6B6eiw&feature=feedu[/media]
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