[Leica] Lytro camera revealed

[henningw at archiphoto.com (Henning Wulff)]

A bit more info yesterday, in the local newspaper:


OTTAWA - The world of photography is about to be 
dramatically altered, and a Canadian is a big 
part of the picture.
Charles Chi, a graduate of Ottawa's Carleton 
University who sold the optical networking 
company he founded, Lightera Networks, to Ciena 
Corp. for $ 452 million in the late 1990s, has 
re-emerged as chairman of Mountain View, Calif., 
company Lytro Inc.
Lytro has developed a new method of taking 
pictures that can capture the angle, colour and 
placement of every ray of light within an image, 
producing a photo that is light years ahead of 
current photographic technology.
The company says it will introduce a 
point-and-shoot camera with the new system this 
fall that will be priced in range of existing 
digital cameras.
Current camera technologies break a 
two-dimensional image into tiny pixels and then 
assign each pixel to an address that allows the 
image to be recreated on a screen.
The more pixels used to make the image, the sharper the image will be.
But Lytro's technology makes pixel mapping technology look like a floppy 
disk.
" It redefines the term megapixel," Chi said in 
an interview Wednesday. " What we are capturing 
now are rays. Rays are much more important than 
pixels.
" The innovation here is being able to actually 
capture the light rays. The angle that the light 
came in, the power, the intensity, the colour. 
All those aspects. I think a lot of photographers 
are going to embrace this and learn a new way of 
taking pictures."
Lytro says its cameras will be capable of taking 
images far faster than digital cameras can.
They'll be better in lowlight situations, and the 
technology used to snap the image means every 
picture taken will be, by default, a 3-D image.
As well, it promises photographers that they will 
never again produce an unfocused image. All the 
information needed to refocus an image will be 
stored in the image file and can be used after 
the picture is taken to sharpen the photograph.
The technology, called light field photography, 
could advance picture-taking in the same way that 
digital cameras pushed photographers to give up 
their aged film-based cameras, its inventors say.
" This is the next big evolution of the camera," 
said Ren Ng, founder and chief executive of Lytro.
" The move to digital from film was extraordinary 
and opened up picture taking to a much larger 
audience. Now you can snap once and focus later 
to get the perfect picture."
The technology started out as a research project 
in a Stanford University lab in the mid1990s. In 
2005, Ng began working with the technology as 
part of his PhD studies at the Palo Alto, Calif., 
school.
Until then, taking a photo that captured all the 
light rays within an image required hundreds of 
cameras hooked to a supercomputer.
" This is a huge revolution, a very big change. I 
think as a company we can bring a lot to the 
table in terms of a product," said Chi.
" It's a very large market. It doesn't take much 
of the market share for us to become a large, 
substantive, independent company."
The company expects to begin selling its first 
point-and-shoot camera to American consumers 
later this year.
An international launch will follow.
Chi wouldn't say what the price of the new camera 
would be. But he said it would be " competitive" 
with more traditional digital camera prices.





At 6:57 PM +0200 6/24/11, philippe.amard wrote:
>really surprising, and it works !!!
>
>thanks for the link
>ph
>
>Le 24 juin 11 ? 18:45, Lawrence Zeitlin a ?crit :
>
>>
>>  A more complete discussion of the Lytro camera, including a semi
>>  satisfactory technical explanation of how it works, is available at:
>>  <
>> 
>>http://www.photographybay.com/2011/06/23/lytro-light-field-camera-shoot-now-focus-later/?awt_l=K9bvg&awt_m=K2Z8JzH2Uv62xu
>>>
>>  Larry Z
>>
>>  _______________________________________________
>>  Leica Users Group.
>>  See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information
>>
>
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Leica Users Group.
>See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information

-- 

       Henning J. Wulff
  Wulff Photography & Design
mailto:henningw at archiphoto.com
   http://www.archiphoto.com