Lytro Pre Order

[KeeFy]

Lytro is now available for pre order from their website.

www.lytro.com

Will this be a game changer?

[ricktas]

It is very interesting tech. I see over on dpreview they are doing their usual and bagging it out, before anyone has even had a chance to try it and give a hands-on review.

And to anyone interested, remember at this stage you need a Mac to import the photos and edit them.

[KeeFy]

"Light Field Resolution 11 Megarays: the number of light rays captured by the light field sensor."

A few bits of questions that are not answered: Final image resolution, Light sensitivity, battery lifespan etc.

[KLi]

I thin these kind of stuff will always be behind in terms of quality from the main stream camera since there are always compromise to achieve the effect. It's still very new and will take a long time to become the standard if ever.

[swifty]

My initial enthusiasm for the Lytro has somewhat dampened as it seems the Lytro will be a fairly closed and proprietry product whereas I'd like to see it as an open platform.
I don't think it's intended for higher end photography, afterall focus is not that big an issue for most advanced amateurs and up.
But as a social media device and platform I think it has huge potential. Imagine in-built sync cability to eg. iPhone with a multitude of third party apps that can manipulate and play with the image.
Final resolution appears quite small currently but that's hardly a problem for web posts like Facebook, although file size may be large comparatively cos of all the other data recorded.
Definitely be keeping a keen eye on Lytro's development. As Keefy said, lots of unknowns but a lot of potential too.

[arthurking83]

The physics of the product don't really relate very convincingly!

lens properties are of an equivalent 35-280mm f/2.
To put this into perspective, imagine your regular 280mm f/2 lens .. and imagine how large this lens is in reality(in the past Nikon have made a 300mm f/2 lens for 35mm) for the 35mm format, and then transpose those specs onto the size of the Lytro product.
The size of the lens would have to mean that the sensor is going to be smaller than most mobile phone sensors, and judging by the resolution of the images, this makes sense.

In effect, all I see in this product is an immensely small digital sensor, which naturally captures a very deep DOF, due to the equivalency factor of the lens, which in real terms may be a 1mm to 8mm lens.
The 1mm-8mm focal length in turn translates to a very deep DOF in any image.

All this product seems to therefore do, is capture an immensely flat image with no blur, artificially blur it, and then the 'software' will then refocus the image to wherever you point at in the image.

I don't believe that the hardware product is anything that resembles a revolutionary or breakthrough technology, and I'm willing to bet that the heart of the system is the software, and how it manipulates the image.

Is it only me that finds it more than coincidental that while this upstart company is developing and about to introduce this 'technology' to us, at the same time Adobe have been developing anti blur technology too!!

I believe that this is basically a cheap thrills box brownie device that simply keeps the controls to a basic minimum just as most mobile phones do.

If the masses find this kind of photography to be the next best thing, I won't be surprised to see an equivalent Android 4.0 app of similar capabilities very very soon too.

Maybe I'm the only one that finds the sample gallery to be entirely unconvincing.

The butterfly image has to be one of the most entertaining visual jokes I've seen in a very long time
I couldn't maintain any interest in the image gallery site, nor the product beyond a few clicks of that one single image.

[KeeFy]

I agree to a certain extent. I believe the sensor does what it says it does. It probably captures maybe 10 planes of light and then with a combination of layering and blurring gives you the final image. I'm expecting the final output image is somewhere along the lines of 5mpx and the sensitivity for night shots is going to be crappy. Also the colours, contrast and image rendition looks so bland i think it should be only retailed at toys-r-us.

[ricstew]

all that tech talk! I think it looks like fun! and that probably how it would be marketed Much cooler than the little coloured point and shoots......I can see then hanging off handbags all over the world! Next they will put a phone in there!
cheers
Jan