Lytro Camera, How it Works? Photo Example
With an innovative camera due out later this year from a company called Lytro, photographers will have one less excuse for having missed that perfect shot.
The company’s technology allows a picture’s focus to be adjusted after it is taken. While viewing a picture taken with a Lytro camera on a computer screen, you can, for example, click to bring people in the foreground into sharp relief, or switch the focus to the mountains behind them.
But is Lytro’s technology just a neat feature, or is it the next big thing in cameras?
The technology has won praise from computer scientists and raves from early users of its prototype camera.
Lytro’s founder and chief executive is Ren Ng, 31. The Lytro camera captures far more light data, from many angles, than is possible with a conventional camera. For a photographer, whether amateur or professional, the Lytro technology means that the headaches of focusing a shot go away. Mr. Hernandez, who is not affiliated with Lytro, was one of several photographers who tested prototypes. Eliminating any loss of resolution in a camera like Lytro’s, which is capturing light data from many angles, is a real advance, said Shree Nayar, a professor at Columbia University and an expert in computer vision. Lytro cameras can also capture plenty of data for 3-D images, which can be viewed on a computer screen with 3-D glasses. The company is also not being more precise about when the camera will ship. It will initially be sold through online retailers like Amazon.com and Lytro’s Web site.
One Lytro convert who caught the attention of the Valley digerati was Kurt Akeley, who joined the company last September from Microsoft Research. Mr. Akeley, a consulting professor at Stanford, was familiar with Mr. Ng’s work and said he was lured by the challenge and technical opportunity. Lytro, Mr. Akeley said, has “a powerful technology with legs — great things can happen.” Lytro chose to design and market a camera itself, instead of licensing its technology to a camera giant like Canon or Nikon.
Ng’s company Lytro is planning on launching the camera this year. Regular Gadget Lab readers will recognize the technology as a a light-field, or plenoptic camera. These camera put an array of micro-lenses over the sensor. This lenticular array sits on the focal plane of the camera (where the light is focused by the lens — also known as the film plane), and the sensor sits slightly behind.
It also replaces much of a camera’s precision mechanics with software.
While this after-the-fact focus choice is the clear wow factor, there are other neat tricks the camera can do with this information. First is that the camera can shoot in much lower light. At first, Lytro will make and market its own camera.