Lytro is currently the only camera on the market that lets you refocus photographs after they’re shot, thanks to its fancy schmancy (and proprietary) light field technology, but it won’t be the only one for long. Toshiba is reportedly developing its own Lytro-style camera that will target a different segment of the photography market: smartphone and tablet photographers.
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Lytro‘s groundbreaking consumer light-field camera made a splash in the camera industry this year by making it possible to refocus photographs after they’re shot. However, the cheapest model for the boxy device has a price tag of $399, and the reviews have been mixed so far.
If you’d like to play around with your own refocus-able photographs without having to buy an actual Lytro device, you can actually fake it using a standard DSLR camera (or any camera with manual focusing and a large-aperture lens).
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We’ve known since last month that Lytro is planning to roll out at least one fancy new feature for its light field cameras (parallax-based 3D), but now the company has taken the wraps off the feature to give us a sneak peek at what they’ll offer. The two new features that will soon appear in Lytro’s Desktop software are called Perspective Shift and Living Filters.
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Lytro has been upgrading its cameras and shipping them to store shelves all over the world as of late, and it’s not planning to let up anytime soon. In addition to the newly added manual controls, the company is gearing up to jump into the world of 3D.
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Lytro’s light field camera began hitting store shelves around the world today, and to celebrate, the company announced a couple of upgrades to the camera: manual new colors and manual controls.
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It has been nearly a year since Lytro announced the world’s first consumer light-field camera that lets users focus photographs after they’re shot. Throughout this time, the camera has only been available direct from the company when ordered through the website. That’ll soon change, as the company announced today that it will be partnering with major retailers around the world to have the camera appear on a store shelf (and website) near you.
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Here’s a talk that Lytro founder Ren Ng gave at TEDxSanJoseCA last month. He talks about the history of photography, his personal interest in it, and how his company’s light field camera will change how future generations think about the art.
(via Vincent Laforet)
Devin Coldewey of TechCrunch created this helpful diagram showing the relative sizes of various sensors, including the one found inside the Lytro light field camera (a camera that lets you focus after shots are taken). The FCC published photos of the Lytro camera’s guts last week, revealing that the sensor inside is roughly 6.5×4.5mm (smaller than our previous estimate). This means that it’s slightly larger than the iPhone sensor and slightly smaller than the one in most point-and-shoot cameras.
Another interesting finding is that the chip inside supports Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. The company says that they’re working on wireless connectivity, but doesn’t have it enabled in the initial Lytro camera.
Lytro Teardown Shows Potential Wireless Capability, Smallish Sensor [TechCrunch]
Yesterday we wrote that Steve Jobs had been interested in Lytro‘s novel camera technology during the final years of his life. PC World did an interview with Lytro executive chairman Charles Chi, who seems to indicate that Lytro is very open to the idea of partnering with cell phone makers and licensing light field technology to them:
If we were to apply the technology in smartphones, that ecosystem is, of course, very complex, with some very large players there. It’s an industry that’s very different and driven based on operational excellence. For us to compete in there, we’d have to be a very different kind of company. So if we were to enter that space, it would definitely be through a partnership and a codevelopment of the technology, and ultimately some kind of licensing with the appropriate partner.
He also states that Lytro has “the capital to do that, the capability in the company to do that, and… the vision to execute.” If Apple were to form an exclusive partnership with Lytro for its iPhone cameras, light field photography would instantly be adopted by the millions of people who purchase the phones every year. That’d definitely be a huge shift in the way people take pictures.
Q&A: Lytro Exec Charles Chi Talks Light Field, Battery Life, and Licensing (via Engadget)
In November of last year, Steve Jobs’ official biographer Walter Isaacson revealed that Jobs had wanted to reinvent three things: television, textbooks, and photography. Last week Apple announced that it was reinventing textbooks with iBooks 2, which is intended to start a digital textbook revolution. The company is also rumored to be working on a Siri-enabled TV. Now, hints about what Steve Jobs wanted to do with photography are starting to emerge, and the murmuring is centered around one company: Lytro.
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