Lytro Announces New Light Field Camera
lytro.com
lytro.com
That said, looks at first glance like an innovative product- If someone can post a link to a website for mere mortals that describes the camera's features I might actually read about what it can do.
Here's what I see: When the mouse is not on the screen, you see 2 pages, both with some important infos missing (which is a usability disaster).
Only once you move the mouse to one of those two areas, a stuttery animation with z-buffer flickering issues enlarges that area somewhat to show all relevant info.
Pages further down in the navigation order look bad, because the diagonal divider cross the navigation list, and some of the background images in mouse-not-on-the-screen state are behind the navigation, and since they have the same brightness level, the navigation is difficult to read.
The screen order includes a splash page. This is bad design because the user has no options where to go next. The button icon to proceed is also misleading: it's a round button with a down arrow.
Very particular.
The webmaster needs a copy of Steve Krug’s “Don’t Make Me Think” … http://brad.me/1pot03u
Please give this website to every designer you know:
Hot-linking is cool, but storing it in the browsing history is not.
Otherwise, I can't see this thing riding on the appeal of viewer refocusing and tilting – that's just not going to escape the realm of gimmick. Unless the tech offers new creative opportunities to the pro / prosumer photographer, I see that market being less likely to spend $1600 on this than consumers were to spend $400 on the original.
Depth of field is just one of many tools used to convey a photograph. For $1500 this camera better blow away other prosumer point-and-shoots like the RX100 Mk II, RX10, Ricoh GR, etc. Given the cost of light-field technology I suspect compromises in sensor sensitivity, dynamic range, and ISO will have to be made.
Ever try and take a picture of a kid? My Nexus 5's auto-focus can't keep up with my toddler at all. Getting this technology down into a compact shooter or cell phone sized camera would be a huge leap.
Question is, will Lytro be able to do it? Will they have the money&perseverance? With their financials they are not likely to move fast enough on this, 5mp equivalent in 2014 is not very impressive. I shelved my Lytro v1 after a couple of days because of the poor image quality, not because of the 'gimmick' disappointing me.
For a typical cell phone, the hyperfocal distance - beyond which everything is in focus with the lens focused at infinity - is maybe 6 feet; you can't get light field information, at all, for anything further than that. And it will be only a tiny bit of information for closer subjects; you can't take shallow depth-of-focus photos with a cell phone, and you can't apply this technology for the same reason. BTW, motion blur is likely a bigger problem for cell phone photos than focus.
Autofocus in smartphones will hopefully get better over time, but if your options are an overall superior DSLR or an equally large camera that just gives you some flexible (albeit one-dimensional) focusing benefits then I think the choice is clear. Practice a little more with your DSLR and wait to see if Lytro can be implanted into a better supporting cast of parts at a reasonable cost.
IIRC the higher-end cameras have algorithms to track the subject and predict where the subject WILL be and focus accordingly. However, I have many friends with Mk III's and they say it's a very hard problem that even the high-end DSLR's don't solve. As you can imagine it's not actually a solvable problem with the present AF latencies as the subject can change course after the algorithm guesses. And when you're shooting shallow DoF even a small mistake will kill the focus on the shot.
The question is whether the Lytro can operate at 1/200 or faster to solve that problem. The specs say 1/4000 is max shutter speed, but IIRC the actual capture speed isn't that fast...
Today, much of lens correction are done in hardware, by adding more lens elements, which makes the hardware larger, heavier and more expensive. Some corrections can be done in software these days (barrel/pincushion distortion, chromatic aberration), but not all.
What they've been able to do with this camera is move a lot of those corrections into software, allowing them to use a simpler, cheaper lens with a very large aperture. The constant F/2 aperture is unheard of in a lens with such a large zoom range.
Besides aberrations, there's another issue with using traditional large-aperture lenses: focusing takes time, and it's not always accurate. With the Lytro, I imagine that you can take pictures instantly without needing to focus, and you can get perfect focus in post-processing.
From what I've seen in the sample gallery, image quality isn't great compared to regular camera/lens combinations in the same price range. This camera might not be for everyone, but I really hope the technology continues to improve and eventually become mainstream.
This was the exact reason why. The refocusing aspect sounded useful and appealing at first but the lack of other features quickly made the device lose real-world applications. This new one looks much cooler/normal and offers more features hw/sw wise but with that price tag I am not sure who their target market is.
Basically, the light field lets you reconstruct a series of images of your subject as seen from every patch of your lens. Of course, for subjects not at infinity, this means multi-view images. This enables
(a) 3D reconstruction, by multi-view matching and having precisely known geometry.
(b) segmentation, by using 3D reconstruction as mentioned above.
(c) Super-resolution, again by multi-view matching, which can let you get back some of the resolution you lost by capturing the image as a "light field" (which means that your sensor can tell which direction the rays hitting it come from - it's done by having an array of lenses in front of the sensor, each covering a patch).
Better segmentation of the image enables all sorts of higher computer vision algorithms.
Whether this technology is any good as a consumer photography product, I am not the one who can say.
• Documentation of crime scenes, with the ability to inspect minor details back at the office
• Artwork photography, so you can inspect the brushwork in fine paintings, or the fine details of sculptures
• Crowd surveillance, being able to get a good image of multiple moving subjects across a wide depth of field
• Product photography, enabling consumers to get a better feel for how an item will look, so they buy with confidence
• Advanced cinematic effects without the need for 3D rendering
• Photography of fast-moving subjects
Returning to the focus, it's true that this has some potential to turn the photographer adage "f/8 and be there" into "f/2 and be there", letting you keep more of the light while the subject is still in focus. However, this is not automatic, since multi-view matching has to be done to superimpose the images of the subject captured from different points of the lens; and this will bring in the difficulties we have with stereo matching, such as occlusions (some parts of the subject can be seen from one point of the lens, but not from another), or ambiguities (it's hard for an algorithm to tell which points of the pictures correspond to the same point of the subject).
A consumer novelty / gimmick won't sell hardware when there are already plenty of smartphone apps that will let you take and share photos in a gimmicky way.
If you want everyday consumer use, make a better camera for taking pictures and video of pets and kids. Make the camera that doesn't stop to focus. Make the camera with one button you hold down to open the shutter, and the camera does the rest (you can select the best shot later). You have to be better than a smartphone camera app, which is hard because smartphone photography is getting very, very good. Camcorders and GoPros in the $500-$1000 range are also very, very good. You'd have to be cheaper and more convenient with similar or better quality.
If you want professional use, you'll have to talk about the optics and image quality, or at least the artistic qualities of the result. Your software should fit into the pro's pipeline and produce a unique result of lasting value. The hardware can be expensive if necessary to meet this goal.
Just my two cents.
I've a Panasonic G1, with an LCD that has multiple degrees of freedom (regular hinge, and then another hinge perpendicular to it). It's the best feature ever. It has allowed me to "unglue" the camera from my eye, and shoot from wherever I like.
Overhead, from the hip, from the side, way out over the handrail - if my arm can reach there, I can shoot from that place.
My big issue is resolution -- they talk about a "40 megaray" sensor (which I'll take to be a 40MP sensor with custom microlenses). The question is how many MP does that effectively translate to (e.g. how large an image can I display). I suspect it's significantly shy of 4K, and quite possibly lower than 1080P.
Note that the original camera had an 11 "megaray" lens. So that suggests a rough doubling of linear resolution -- good but not great.
It seems to me that resolution is an obvious question, and it was a major shortcoming of the original camera (your photos were essentially tiny). Why not address this head-on?
Assuming they move to 4:3 that would be around 1800p. That's pretty darn good, and likely would look perfectly OK slightly upscaled to 4K (assuming that's 1800p and sharp).
The camera itself is beautiful! It looks like a blackmagic design cinema grown up.
I think they would probably do better as a "designed for rental" vs purchased camera, though. It is enough of a novelty that I'd see people using it for a few shoots, but like a tilt shift lens, it is only going to be daily useful to a limited number of people. Especially with limited production, rental would rock --- either direct, or throug something like borrowlenses or lumoid.
Additionally, Lytro has worked out a deal with Adobe and Apple so you can transfer those images to Lightroom, Photoshop or Aperture if you wish to work on them after you've adjusted the image's focus and depth of field to your heart's desire.
http://www.theverge.com/2014/4/22/5625264/lytro-changed-phot...
http://www.engadget.com/2014/04/22/lytro-illum/
http://www.dpreview.com/news/2014/04/22/lytro-announces-illu...
http://www.dpreview.com/news/2014/04/22/q-a-with-lytro-s-ceo...
http://petapixel.com/2014/04/22/lytro-unveils-illum-light-fi...
Q: This is a very versatile lens - a bright, constant aperture, lots of zoom, and 13 elements, which is relatively few for a design like this. How are you able to create something like this?
A: We designed it in-house and worked with a Japanese partner to build it ... This plays directly into one of the cooler parts of light field, which is this ability to use the additional data that we capture to get breakthrough hardware performances. There’s no lens on the market that’s equivalent to this.
The reason is that, in the conventional sense, you would’t be able to deal with the aberration correction you’d need across that long a zoom and that wide an aperture. The typical way you’d deal with aberration correction is with glass elements - traditional optics. Since we capture all of the directional data within the light field, we’re able to do aberration correction in software and computation. It’s the first big example of us trading out physical components of the camera and replacing those with software and computation to give the market something you just couldn’t do conventionally.
But I think it can be awesome for macro photography or anything where you're not in full creative control at the time like those automated wildlife critter cams, balloon/kite/drone photography, selfies, webcam shots, mars rovers...
Congratulations to Lytro - getting this stuff on the market with increasing quality will change the world, perhaps in ways we don't yet expect.
http://www.dpreview.com/news/2014/04/22/q-a-with-lytro-s-ceo...
It also has an article, which manages to contain the fact they have been skirting around. It says it produces 5MP images.
http://www.dpreview.com/news/2014/04/22/lytro-announces-illu...
I do think this should help with some things, certainly. Seems this could much more quickly determine distance between some things than a 3d mapping of items would take.
I would be curious if there are numbers on this regard. But, I don't know any reason right off to dismiss it. It is not that uncommon for photographs to focus on the wrong item. This basically solves that problem, right?
Photography: the camera on my phone has been good-enough for me for years, so I'm a poor judge of camera needs. But I just haven't heard any photo-nerd complain about the problems with focus on a camera, so I am not sure there is an actual problem here that Lytro is solving.
The original Lytro was a cool idea, but I think the slow time-to-market caused it a dragged out death. Google put the last bullet in.
That's like saying my MP3 player from the early 2000s had a microphone and cost $200, so why would anyone buy thousands of dollars of professional audio equipment anymore to record music?
But wait a second. We're talking about the Google Camera lens blur function, right? That feature is only really simulating out of focus blur, which is not really the same as what Lytro does.
What Lytro does more akin to focus bracketing, isn't it?
I could imagine a system which captures a whole lot of frames with some camera shake, identifies which parts of it moved, and then computes "real" lightfield bokeh for the stationary background while filling in with just image-space blur for the gaps.
The thing is, the fake bokeh is nasty looking to people who know how to judge bokeh, which is a fairly small portion of camera phone users. To most of them, it's probably good enough for what they are trying to accomplish. And in that regard, while it won't make a conventional large sensor camera obsolete, it'll still have enough people saying "my smartphone can do that, why would I bother buying a big camera that doesn't fit in my pocket?"
>> This thing is actually pretty impressive and lets you do stuff you cannot do with any other camera.
I agree with this, but I often wonder if the Lytro is a solution looking for a problem.
My take is that this camera will have some major advantages in shutter speed and quickly taking successive pictures.
As an example, at my child's soccer practice, it is not uncommon to fire off about 5 shots in any 2 second interval. It is also not uncommon to have 4 of those shots be out of focus. Heck, all five.
This camera could solve that. The phone solution fails, as I can't take that many pictures that quickly.
Right?
I'm not sure Lytro's necessarily the right the solution for this either, at least not today.
I know I'll get laughed at and mocked for saying this, but I bought an inexpensive Nikon One camera for a very similar use case. I got tired of carrying my DSLR around on doggie play dates, and while the Nikon One may suck at an incredibly long list of things, the one thing it still does better than just about every other mirrorless camera out there (even with the Fuji XT1 and Sony A6000 now on sale) is AF on moving subjects. It can track a dog running towards me (the hardest part about AF in this use case) just about as well as my DSLR.
If you don't believe me about the moving subject AF, Thom Hogan agrees:
Which is why I think this conversation needs to happen. I'm not sure what the benefits are. I'm just not dismissive, either. Nor do I think the camera phone will completely destroy the DSLR any time soon.
(I do think it will eventually happen. Maybe not the camera phone, per se, but camera sensors could advance such that having many different cameras will be for novelty more than utility.)
The 5DMKII isn't going to win any awards in AF speed (it is still a great camera, imo) but you can do some stuff to mitigate your issues. Try shooting with a smaller aperture to get more depth of field, and consider learning how to manually zone focus. If you know the distances for which your lens is "in focus" for a particular aperture, and can evaluate how far away your subjects are, you might get better results. I think this is how they did this in the "good old days".
It is more work, requires learning (I think it's a useful skill, but that's just me), but if you've got AF limitations and don't want to throw money at the problem (i.e., get an MKIII), it doesn't hurt to try.
Biggest thing for me to learn now is how to work with a zoom lens. Then, get a better one. (Well, I say zoom, I really just mean telephoto. Right now I have a zoom one, but expect to move to a prime one eventually.)
And I think you are dead on, learning how they did things in the "good old days" is a huge skill that has been helping a lot. Things are a little tougher when my child is effectively running around at random right now. I expect that to change, as well.
Heck, often times I'm happy to just take videos. Really liking how well they turn out with this camera.
The Lytro still needs to be focused; the trick it uses is to focus to the hyperfocal distance as you zoom, and then it can capture the equivalent of focus stacking fore and aft of that point; but only on a finite number of focal planes ( fewer than 6 if I recall ).
So... your photos could end-up being nearly in focus, but also lacking in detail ( low-res sensor ) and blown-out ( poor dynamic range ).
And, regardless of that, this still goes a much farther way towards "solving" this problem than the camera phone. Right?
The example was more to get an idea of what this could help with. In short, if you are taking pictures of things in motion, or multiple shots in succession, the camera app that was recently displayed is nigh useless. Right?
It is outpaced quite a bit by even "lesser" (more consumer oriented) cameras like the 70D (though as with anything this is a trade-off since the 70D is a cropped-sensor, so IQ not quite as good under ideal situations, worse low-light performance, etc).
Here's a photo I took a couple of months ago with the 70D, one of a series of 5 that were all pretty well focused (considering the subject was a cheetah running at nearly full speed) using the "AI Servo" autofocus mode:
http://i.imgur.com/jMOKZk0.jpg
(To be fair, such photos still aren't exactly point and shoot on my 70D, you have to be fairly decent at panning at that speed)
You do have a point though in that the current situation for me is needing to have multiple cameras (70D for fast action, Sony A7 for relatively still shots with very high image quality, Canon EOS M for carrying around everywhere). I don't think this Lytro comes anywhere close to changing that situation, though computational imaging in general will probably solve the issue eventually.
I'm definitely game for any advice I can get. I hate that I let that example detract from the discussion, which is for average photographers, something like this could help a lot. Doesn't sound like it is fully there, yet. But it is promising. Especially in tandem with the app idea. Exciting times are ahead for getting folks into photography.
Perhaps this new thing will bring something new to the scene. But at 5 MP it feels immature. The technology friendly photographers it could attract are usually not so hot on bridge cameras with huge zoom lenses. Perhaps a fixed lens (or 24-50mm equiv) would have been a better choice.
I suspect this will be the same. I think the future of focus control might lie in Google's new camera app[1] and phones with dual cameras. Just give them some raw format love (like the 1020 got).
[1] http://googleresearch.blogspot.se/2014/04/lens-blur-in-new-g...
I really like the sample images where you can perspective shift slightly. So what I'd like to see is a two camera/sensor setup to capture a 3D image.
I can then take the result, stick my Oculus Rift on and view the result. The perspective shift lets me move my head around a bit.
Better yet, stick more sensors on, capture as wide a field of view as possible (closer to 360 the better), and recreate the whole scene in a Rift compatible viewer. You wouldn't have to move around, just have enough of the scene that you can look a bit to the left and right. It would let you feel like you are there to a greater degree. I'd buy something like this for sure.
All in all it seems like a nice step forward in camera technology that supports and simplifies traditional camera technology (allowing simpler, and cheaper, lens for example) while adding a new way to be creative (Light field effects) and maintaining quality.
I don't, however, see it fundamentally changing photography. Just a nice new technology that will pave the way for the next 20 years of camera advances.
But the Lytro can capture an actual 3d scene right? So maybe the Lytro is the perfect companion to the oculus rift. The field of view will be limited (like looking through a window) but at least it will be true 3d and could respond correctly to head movements!
disclaimer: I used to work at Lytro
What a terrible product website.
I think it's very well designed (aesthetically and functionally) -- with any camera, you're going to spend quite a bit of time looking down at the physical thing, tilted downwards in your hand, trying to see if you got a good shot (looking at the preview), I think the design is a pretty bold move towards better practical usability.
Also I didn't mention it before, but I think the whole design has a more natural grip
A conventional lens will let you take an all-in-focus portrait, and we have increasingly seen that digital techniques produce a similar if not better image on cellphones.
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If I take a photo, I'm not going to distribute the image in a proprietary format to allow refocusing. That leaves using it as a way to fix mistakes -- which, as you become better at photography, become less worth it.
Light-field cameras might gain ground in the future, but photographers can be a conservative bunch. The current top of the line professional cameras are astoundingly similar to the film cameras they replaced, and not for lack of manufacturers trying.
I will be pre-ordering, if only to encourage startups to think bigger than software.
Stunning!
Interesting that you say that:
> ‘We’re not a camera company’
> Lytro's ultimate, simplest goal is to turn the physical parts of the camera — the lens, the aperture, the shutter — into software.
[1]: http://mobile.theverge.com/2014/4/22/5625264/lytro-changed-p...