Lytro is another interesting camera technology. It is a focusless camera. To explain this, we’ll share an explanation from their website:
“Unlike a conventional camera that captures a single plane of light, the Lytro camera captures the entire light field, which is all the light traveling in every direction in every point in space.”
There are two advantages to this. First, it allows you to focus in on individual objects in the frame after the fact. Additionally, since there is no focus, images are captured instantly, without any delay for an auto-focus feature to adjust the lens.
This photo gives you a good idea of the size of the camera.
This type of camera could prove most useful as a vacuum-style collection system. Turn it on and let it run in a wide area surveillance mode, shooting photo after photo after photo. Later, the imagery could be analyzed in a forensic mode to spot individual phenomenon. The fact that such technologies are becoming more widely available at the consumer level makes them great candidates for disruptive technologies.
Tags: Lytro
“Enhance…enhance…”
Light-field cameras sound like a good idea in theory. However, if one starts looking into the details of what Lytro will be offering the current limitations become pretty obvious.
First of all, the resolution is very small – the models about to be released only seem to produce images of 500 by 500 pixels – making small details impossible to spot even if they are in focus.
In spite of the small resolution, the image files are very large – about 20 Megabytes each – and no video support is available right now.
Also, if one looks at the depth of field of modern compact-sensor cameras, anything from 3ft distance to infinity can be kept in focus withour refocussing, making them infinitely more suitable for surveillance.
The toy has an aperture at f2 so post focusing is made essential with this, if one wants everything in focus then minimize the aperture of another lens. This whole “woah I’m an artists photographer person because my later choosing of where the focus is at shows how amazing I am at taking pictures” is plain ridiculous. I can see this tech expanding into many other fields, but so far it’s nothing more than a gimmick.