Biggest change to photography since 1800s

[Zach Matthews]

Curious from the pros here what the think of this technology?

“In short, Lytro is developing a new type of camera that dramatically changes photography for the first time since the 1800s.”

http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/21/lytro-launches-to-transform-photography-with-50m-in-venture-funds-tctv/

Any truth to the hype?

[Tim Schulz]

Any truth to the hype?

Short answer . . . yes.

(Here is the NYT story:  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/22/technology/22camera.html?_r=1)

Here is a medium-length answer:
Conventional cameras use all of their pixels to detect the spatial intensity of light in the image plane of the camera.  Depending on the f/#, focus setting, and relative distances to the objects within the field-of-view, some parts of the scene will be in-focus, and some parts will be out-of-focus.

For the past decade or so, several researchers in the fields of “computation sensing and imaging” and “computational photography” have been developing ways to encode depth information into the data collected by a camera’s detector.  The Stanford group that Lytro’s founder came from modified a standard DSLR by placing a tiny array of lenses directly in front of the camera’s detector.  By doing so, they gave up some of the spatial resolution, but were able to encode depth.  By processing those data, they could selectively ‘focus’ the image to different depths.  

Other groups have worked on replacing a traditional lens with a distorted lens.  The distortion in the lens is designed in a way that essentially blurs the image the same regardless of range.  The blur can then be removed through post-processing resulting in an extended depth-of-focus with a small f-number.  In short, you can obtain large depth-of-focus with a fast lens.  (Sound good for macro?)

Nothing is free, so all of these approaches have a down-side.  The biggest being a relative loss of spatial resolution.  This is the issue raised by the Columbia University professor in the NYT article.  Because Lytro is a commercial venture, it is difficult to get all of the details about their technology and the manner in which they are improving on and/or eliminating some of the down-sides.  

I do believe that advances over the next decade in the field of “computational photography” will change the way we think about and use cameras.  

[David Anderson]

The biggest change to photography since the 1800’s is everybody is a photographer and nobody pays for pictures anymore.. 😀

That is some very cool tech just the same.. 😉

www.dsaphoto.com

A picture is thousand words that takes less than a second while a thousand words is a picture that takes a month.

[Bob Riggins]

I would think film to digital would be considered a change.

[Author]

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