I won’t be plopping my dough down just yet but I sure am interested in this new “Light Field” camera called the Lytro.
The camera’s main cool feature is that you can adjust your focus AFTER you have shot the picture.
Play with this page and you will get it. Just click on the foreground then on the background. Same picture, different depth of field.
The camera, for now, has a minimal zoom and software to do the re-focus is Mac-centric but they promise a Windows version soon.
There is also this advantage-And focusing after the fact, means no auto-focus motor. No auto-focus motor means no shutter delay. So, capture the moment you meant to capture not the one a shutter-delayed camera captured for you. Of course if you are using a higher end camera, this is no issue.
Capture living pictures with the press of a single button. By instantly capturing complete light field data, the Lytro camera gives you capabilities you’ve never had in a regular camera.
Once you post your images on Facebook, for example, others can explore your images too, changing focus and depth of field. It works on on nearly any device, like mobile phone, your web browser or tablet.
This technology, no doubt, will emerge. It is a big change from shutter technology. Wonder where it will take us.
Before rushing to buy one of these game-changing devices, however, one should be aware that there are limitations to what the camera and its associated software can currently do, Mossberg said. “Its ‘living pictures’ can’t be imported into standard photo software, only to its own accompanying software. The pictures can be exported into the standard JPEG format for use in other software, but then they lose their ability to be refocused,” he explained in his Wall Street Journal column on the camera. He also noted that it cannot currently crop photos and the software only works on Macs at the moment, though more features and a Windows version are coming.
For this reason, Mossberg told FOX Business he’d consider it more of a second camera for most people, but he still found it very promising. “I certainly think it has the potential to become your principle camera when you’re not using your cell phone or… they could even get this kind of technology eventually into cell phones,” he said.