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Comment by helloworld | Hacker News Reader

Our first-generation L16 camera will start reaching consumers early next year, for an initial retail price of $1,699.

It's a cool concept, but I'm hoping that the second generation is a lot cheaper.

If it's equivalent in quality to a DSLR, especially in low-light, then it's definitely worth it.

Not so sure, for a lot less than $1699 you can buy some very good micro 4/3 cameras which would probably give this a run for its money in low light settings. micro 4/3 is not quite "tiny", but judging from the picture of the founder holding one up, neither us this (despite what the headline claims).

The largest part of a micro 4/3 or a DSLR is the lens usually, and this thing goes around that, so I'd say it's seriously smaller. We can just speculate at this point about the low light performance though, I can't wait to see some proper review.

You can consider a fixed lens 1" sensor compact like a Sony RX100. It's got half-decent low light performance. It may not beat a 2016 consumer level DSLR for low light, but it's probably comparable to a 2008-2010 Rebel.

There's a mobility premium since this fits in your pocket. Much smaller than an A6300 with pancake lens. You could potentially jog with this in a wildlife refuge, then take bird shots.

SLR or mirrorless lenses that do 28-150 equivalent are pretty heave and bulky. The worst bit is that the camera body and the lens are perpendicular so the size of the full system (measured as a bounding box) becomes pretty extreme.

This system has a big benefit in that the optical axes are along the camera body so the flatness is preserved. I remember a few (single lens) digital compacts that did this in the past.

A reasonably modern DSLR in low light is pretty high bar; my old Nikon D3 (2nd hand) can capture near-daylight in pitch darkness in HI.3 mode...

Yeah, I've used my d7100 at night in near pitch black to take pictures of the deer I can hear, but can't see. The sensitivity of modern sensors while maintaining low noise is pretty amazing.

One part of the article is especially about how cheap the lenses and the sensors that he is using are. So, I expect the manufacturing costs to be only a fraction of those needed for DSLR. So, I would expect the price to be a fraction of those of DSLRs too.

Low light shooting is an often underappreciated aspect of modern DSLRs. Way back when I'd go through all sorts of chemical gyrations to get decent results at 1600 (ASA at the time) out of B&W film. Now I can easily get to 6400 or more out of my DSLR at pretty high fidelity by moving a dial.

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