Focus-free street shooting, might be kewl, if the quality is indeed up to other quality compacts.
Update: there are indications that the resolution is quite low on this camera. Caveat emptor.
Update:
Bruce said...
This could be the beginning of a major change in still photography, perhaps bigger than the switch to digital from film.
Of course it won't be perfect to begin with, but this is definitely something I'm keeping an eye on.
Was the very first cart with wheels all that much better than the good old, dependable sledge? Maybe not.
Eolake Stobblehouse said...
Interesting point.
The dependance of cameras and lenses to have all the light hitting in exactly the same spot exactly in the film plane has been a big technical bottle neck all along. It's spectacularly difficult to make a lens which does it well, and even then the bulk of the subject will be out of focus normally.
This could be the beginning of a major change in still photography, perhaps bigger than the switch to digital from film.
ReplyDeleteOf course it won't be perfect to begin with, but this is definitely something I'm keeping an eye on.
Was the very first cart with wheels all that much better than the good old, dependable sledge? Maybe not.
Interesting point.
ReplyDeleteThe dependance of cameras and lenses to have all the light hitting in exactly the same spot exactly in the film plane has been a big technical bottle neck all along. It's spectacularly difficult to make a lens which does it well, and even then the bulk of the subject will be out of focus normally.
My impression is that they throw away resolution., so you can't get as large a print. Whether that matters, we will see.
ReplyDeleteWhen I talked to Lytro they seemed to be putting the emphasis on how the photos are viewed, rather than how they are taken. It seemed to be more about how there are more viewers of photos than photographers, and acknowledgement of how photos are distributed electronically rather than on print.
ReplyDeleteWe'd spent the previous year and a bit sweating on getting 1080p out of our cameras, and all were shocked at the low resolution of the Lytro camera.
I guess I was right when I thought they wouldn't make Q4 (retail fall reset) or even Black Friday.
At the end of the day I just took it as interview practice. They are just down the street from my favorite Salvadorian restaurant, and my friends favourite Thai restaurant.
That low, Alex?
ReplyDeleteWhen you say "our cameras", who's that?
It's admittedly hard to imagine you could do this thing without throwing away resolution, and in such a small camera, it can hardly have been like 30MP to begin with...
Lytro acknowledged that "final image quality may be considerably less than that of conventional digital cameras" in their announcement.
ReplyDeleteSo it begs the question: do people want to spend more time getting a lower-quality picture, or spend no time getting fairly good results from your average P&S camera? I just don't see a revolution here, cool as this thing might be.
seems a gimmick to me. unless it can be used to create images where you can choose a very large depth of field, or whatever it is you want. nobodies going to spend time clicking on images. I tried on their site and it was fun but after a few photos it gets tedious
ReplyDelete