It doesn’t happen very often to see a major paradigm shift in the photo camera industry. Mirrorless was one of them and now Lytro is leading a new revolution. In short, it is the first camera that takes picture without the need to focus on a single point. The full image is in focus and if you want to add some focusing effect you can do it after you took the picture.
To see how it works check out the latest two reviews at The Verge (Click here) and Dpreview (Click here). The product page is available here: www.lytro.com.
The current product is more a toy than a real usable camera and I don’t know if that new kind of photography will play a major role in future. But I will keep a close eye on lytro because I may be wrong and the future will not be DSLR or Mirrorless but Lytro 🙂
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4 Responses
add some mechanical manual controls, mechanical shutter release button and a tiltable screen and it could be a nice camera for street photography. combining the ability to take pictures without spending time on focussing(usually done by stopping down and prefocusing) and shallow dof.
Such a thing is already available for existing sensors. It is custom and costs quite a bit.
Now I’m the last one to glorify paper thin DOF with need to stop down lens to hell and back for getting big DOF but this light field camera is more solution without problem to solve than any revolution.
Outside some niches (especially macros) there’s simply little use for unlimited DOF/being able to select it after taking picture… unless you don’t have any clue in the first place about taking photos.
Especially when getting bigger than postage stamp size image from this tech requires bazillion pixels which are hence very tiny and with crap dynamic range/SNR.
And in case of sensor tech eventually enabling tiny pixels to have reasonable DR then pixels of normal camera with sensor of same size would have as much higher performance allowing more freedom in ISO selection. (like for example for being able to stop down lens in low light)
Mirrorless wasn’t real paradigm shift, digital sensors were that paradigm shift. Mirrorless is just one consequence of digital sensors.
This camera will cost 5 dollars in a second hand store 8 years from now.