Sankeibiz reports that Panasonic has developed a Lightfield digital system camera. It works just like the well-known [shoplink 54342 ebay]Lytro camera (here on eBay)[/shoplink]. The camera allows you to refocus the image in post production (see the official Panasonic example above). But unlike the Lytro this is actually a system camera! There is no word yet if it has a Micro Four Thirds or another new mount. Let’s hope it’s MFT!
Sankeibiz says Panasonic will commercialize the camera sometimes in 2016.
The advantage of such a camera is that you would never “miss the focus” in any shot as everything on the image or video would be “in focus”. More info about Light field cameras can be read on Wikipedia.
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found via Digicameinfo and Dicahub.
53 Responses
Come on …. Pana .
Put more R&D on how to mass improve ISO performance & DR increment in m43 imaging is
what you should work with .
Not another new system !!!
* APSC & FF , all double it’s ISO performance with latest cameras
m43 ?????????
If you want to shoot in darkness, buy a A7s. Go away. Thanks.
Sometimes you have to look very far ahead before you take a step forward. This is somewhat experimental, and currently it’s little more than an interesting gimmick, but where would we be if we didn’t keep an eye on the distant future once in a while?
If they can get better resolution than Lytro currently achieves with the Illum, I think this is a more significant development than any marginal improvement in low light capabilities.
If this is an MFT camera, you can shoot a f0.95 lens wide open all the time and never need to worry about missed focus of too shallow DoF. That ends up being more of a low light advantage than FF…
but at f0.95 the lens is not excacly sharp. biger sensors have a resolution advantage. (drooling over a pentax 645z)
It’s not super sharp, but the actual plane of focus is decent, part of it just how smaller an area of DoF there is.
The SLR Magic T0.95 lens is actually pretty sharp wide open, as well. Better than the Voigtlanders, and faster, too (since it’s T-stops not F-stops).
just buy sony sensors.
Which one? The one in the EM10 or EM5?
Given how much investment Panasonic has in MFT, I doubt its a new system. Even if it is a new system, I am sure they would offer an adapter so that MFT lenses could be used.
You are a really tiresome dude(and you know as well as I do, that there are no APS-C systems with double the performance of m43). How much DR and low ISO do you need anyway? There are very few pictures I could not make because of hardware limitations, and there are a lot of pictures I did make because I got all my(compact and light) gear with me.
I need 15 usable stops. That way I can stop lugging around graduated ND filters when I want to take photos outside.
I’ve been threatening my girlfriend to go for a boob job otherwise i will leave her! but she is not buying it 🙂
I keep saying that this tech will be popularily used. It alows greater creativity in digital media.
New features on websites with more dynamic content.
Not interested. Pointless frippery.
Never missing focus – or having built in focus stacking for deep DoF with wide open apertures…that’s pointless frippery?
Being able to select the point of focus is not pointless frippery. People use the “blur” tool in Photoshop/Lightroom to blur objects that they don’t want to be the point of focus in photos with too much DOF. Until you try it, its not pointless frippery. Panasonic seems to think there is a market for it.
“Panasonic – Browse all 3D TV”
🙂
No such thing as a free lunch so call me dubious.
AF was also a kind of ‘free lunch’ 30 years ago.
Uhmm, autofocus has never been and still isn’t a “free lunch”.
Back then it was slow and inaccurate, and now it’s faster and more accurate then MF(in most cases where the subject is moving). AF is used by default now. In that regard it’s maybe not very different then Lytro is now, if it’s disadvantages can be solved(f.e. more MP, non proprietary software, interchangeable lenses), it could become the default way of taking a picture..change focus later.
I would love a MFT Lytro camera to take some macro pictures with it(and stack them, although I think there are some technical issues to be solved first).
Nothing against Lytro, I am simply pointing out that AF comes at a cost. And it is not only about speed or accurateness. It has affected everything – OVF, lens design, sensors etc. And the fact that it is used “by default”, as you say, is also a problem.
There is no free lunch. Do some research. To gather that much light the aperture isn’t super fast.
I don’t know what you mean?
The lens in the Lytro Illum is f1.0. It is indeed super fast.
it’s f2.0
Very interesting developments and I am sure it will take center stage sooner or later.
But I don’t expect large sensors any time soon. Current tech allows for (mapped to conventional systems) around 5 MB pixels and that is far too tiny to create posters.
Anyhow I expect huge opposition from conventional thinking photographers…
It’s just a question of time before some new manufacturing process allows this to work at much higher resolutions. I bid any development in imaging technology welcome, even if it means the way current lenses work with apertures may become somewhat redundant. It all depends on what side-effects this will have on the resulting images and our aesthetic taste.
it’s over,
lytro is finished.
🙂 I haven’t seen this Panasonic camera in stores yet..
Lytro init with 22MP and 5.4K readout downscale to 4K.
30FPS with raw still image (17mp) and 4K video.
how you feel?
i think it new generation of camera,no miss auto focus.
Intentionally I think.
The lytro is quite an advanced camera, special 36MP sensor (one lightfield pixel is actually a 3×3 pixel with one microlens), good lens. There is no way some completely unknown startup company could develop and manufacture this alone. I always imagined they were backed by some major player.
My wild guess, Panasonic has been involved from the beginning, hiding behind some obscure company name so they could just terminate it without losing face in case the technology did not pan out.
Actually there is a BIG detail that always left me cold about the Lytro cameras (I follow them since their start, just out of curiosity): the proprietary software you NEED to actually see and use the picture you take.
It’s like uploading them for free.
Good to see that tech is evolving also in this way, but I think that if I missfocused a shot I’m the one to blame. Error Is part of photography: do we really want/need a camera that does everything for us? (Me, not) And when I take a photo I usually know what’s the subject.
Its less about missfocus, and more about being able to control DoF much easier in post than using depth map methods today.
Do you ever use autofocus? Do you ever use automatic white balance? Do you ever use automatic metering?
These are all things that photographers in times past would have completely blamed themselves for (missed focus, wrong filmstock, misjudged Sunny 16 or light meter reading…)
I think that being a photographer should be about allowing the tools to get out of the way and letting the artist focus on producing the imagery they envision. That’s far more important to me than merely being a camera technician who can nail focus and expose properly.
I use autofocus as well as manual focus. i change white balance if that’s the case. I have custom white balance for three different infrared style of photo too, if needed.
That’s not the point.
The point is that I don’t like the total absence of challenge that a “everything is in focus, choose your subject now and crop the picture at your pleasure while sitting in front of your computer” option would give me.
Why? Because I usually plan my shot, be it a week before it, or just a fraction of a second before pressing the shutter button, when I realize that there’s a subject for me and my tools.
The lytro thing, this Panasonic patent, are both interesting, but they are also one step closer to the moment when the photographer will be obsolete and not necessary: mount a camera on a drone and let it fly, then someone (a technician, not a photographer) will crop and focus to create the image needed.
Call me old fashioned, but I use to enjoy photography. And I’m not a camera technician.
See it’s funny, because I totally disagree with this; because I think it still requires just as much planning, just as much vision, just as much timing to create a strong image. It just means that that catching the “pivotal moment” isn’t ruined by a technical blunder caused by missed focus. It’s the kind of technology that will lead to more masterful photos being created because there are fewer excuses not to execute on that creative vision.
I enjoy photography more than ever with the digital aids and post-processing software available. But I also believe that many of the best photos are made, not taken, and that hasn’t changed in the last 100 years…
Let’s see in ten years how many photographers there will be, and how many technicians will work on pictures taken by intelligent tools.
The difference is that a photographer has already an idea of what he is going to do when going on assignment.
An “intelligent” camera, taking a wide angle shot of 1 gigapickle and allowing someone to cut a high enough resolution photo of something that was in the angle of view does the job.
Maybe better.
You like that, and me not. We disagree and that’s fine. 🙂
even with “intelligent” cameras there will be bad photographers and good photographers.
I wonder how many DOF-addicted photographers would still find challenging bokeh inspiration if every consumer could just simply get it any way and any how they want it. I’m thinking of a song called ‘video killed the radio star’. Don’t know, we’ll see.
I can’t say, I’m not a big fan of the wall of bokeh. Sometimes it is nice, but I get bored easily.
I have a friend who keeps showing me photos of models, and I started to reply saying “nice girl” 🙂
Too often the subject isolation is just an excuse to distract from a poor composition, but the abuse of it quickly becomes boring.
As I wrote before, I prefer to follow my instinct and nail the photo I have in my mind (key words are “my mind”, not “nail” intended as just nailing the focus). I know, this feature could help many pro photographers to not miss any photo, but outside of a payed assignement, I only see it as another way to become even more lazy than what smartphones are already doing to a lot of young people (no, I’m not against tech, but tech is making our a$$es too lazy)
Good riddance, I say. Shallow DoF is a relatively recent fad, anyway, an elitist response to the popularity of small sensor digital point-and-shoot and phone cameras. Historically, most photographers struggled to get enough depth of field with low sensitivity films and fast enough shutter speeds to avoid mirror slap…
Ehhh, I didn’t say I like that at all. Mostly because you have no control over angle of view, and there’s no vision. Perspective and field of view is a major part of the impact of an image. On top of all that, the slippery-slope scenario that you’re predicting is a whole lot of work! It’s much easier for me to spot a good photo and snap it than it is for me to spot a good photo within a photo that represents a 0.1% crop of the whole image.
Suggesting that removing focus error from the equation is tantamount to the end of photography is a bit of overdramatic hyperbole.
fastest autofocus ever
How lame marketing. They should have presented it as quicker replacement of focus stacking.
Huh? This hasn’t been marketed, nor presented to anyone.
oops, you are right
Panasonic is big in industrial market. Chances are that the camera is for industrial applications, not really a consumer-level m43.
But already in 2012 there were rumors/anouncements/etc about light-field video camera… Who knows. If that is a video camera, it might even get interesting.
where’s my goddamn v-log ?
I doubt the new system gonna be established based on m4/3 mount. If that’s the case, Panasonic would have announced it without hesitation. Why not? That said, I hope we can use m4/3 lenses on new system.
This is only my supposition, but if in fact this camera is gathering all the information for an in-focus image at all distance levels, the size of the file captured shoudl be substantially larger than that of an image focused only at one distance. This is only basic logic.
If I understand the techtnology correctly, the Lytro illum uses a cluster of 3×3 pixels with a common microlens to capture the depth information. The resulting JPEGs are 4MP, but the actual sensor resolution is 36MP. Images need to be recorded in RAW if you want to focus afterwards. If you want to do this in video, you would need to write 1GB/s. It would be difficult to compress that without losing any depth info.
What I do not know, does the Lytro have a specially designed lens to get the most out of the technology or would it work the same with any lens?
If Lytro’s products are of any indication, this feature won’t help Panasonic much.
Only interested if ‘everything in focus’ is REALLY in focus and tack sharp.
In theory this sounds like a cool idea, but I don’t expect this to revolutionize photography at all.
I do like to play with selective sharpening/blurring in photoshop to enhance or exaggerate a properly focused image and make it really pop. But if it’s misfocused it’s not so much that I couldn’t force the composition I want but more that the detail is insufficient to really pop, and thus the image not worth keeping really.
So far all examples I’ve seen look too mushy and lacking in detail, the opposite of pop – and I don’t think it’s just a matter of not enough resolution.