Focus on the Future

After two weeks with the Lytro camera, I still can’t decide if it’s a highly refined proof-of-concept or an uneven look at the future of photography. It’s simultaneously addictive and frustrating. It’s also, as advertised, a truly unique photographic experience.

If you missed the hype surrounding the announcement of Lytro’s light-field camera last year, the short explanation is that it allows you to focus your photos after you’ve taken them.

That’s the addictive part. No Lytro photo is ever finished. You can continually readjust an image to focus on the foreground, middle, or background merely by clicking around the image. This also means it’s nearly impossible to take an out-of-focus picture. Just aim and shoot, then focus later.

Lytro calls these “living pictures,” and all the data that powers this re-focusing trick travels with each square-cropped image. Post a Lytro photo (using the company’s custom Flash widget) on your blog, on Facebook or on Twitter, and your friends and followers can refocus the picture in their browsers without downloading any special software. It’s like a choose-your-own-ending Instagram.

At the core of the Lytro camera are the light-field sensor (hardware) and light-field engine (the software). The sensor, which looks like a flat, square fly’s eye, enables the camera to capture all the light traveling in every direction in a scene, rather than just the rays aimed directly at the lens. Think of all the light you see through a typical viewfinder as a rectangular cube. A conventional photo focuses on one plane of that cube. A light-field image captures the whole thing. Instead of megapixels, Lytro measures the sensor’s power in terms of how many millions of rays of light it captures — in this case, 11 million, or 11 megarays.

As I said, playing around with these images is addictive. But the camera suffers from design and usability issues. It’s a first-generation piece of hardware that has to solve problems no one has ever faced before. So, as would be expected, there are some kinks. The touch-sensitive zoom is too sensitive, and the 1.5-inch touchscreen feels too small and unresponsive. Also, while the always- in-focus nature of the camera does simplify one aspect of photography, taking a compelling light-field image requires more time and compositional forethought than normal point-and-shoot snapping. There’s a learning curve here that Lytro’s hardware design doesn’t really help.

 Read more http://www.wired.com/