That is one of the worst product websites I have ever seen... I have an updated version of Chrome and Win8.1 and am either too stupid to figure out how to navigate the site or it simply doesn't work at all. Does anyone else have a diagonal divider that runs away from you if you bring your mouse near it?
That said, looks at first glance like an innovative product- If someone can post a link to a website for mere mortals that describes the camera's features I might actually read about what it can do.
Yes, I have to fight with that diagonal divider as well.
Here's what I see: When the mouse is not on the screen, you see 2 pages, both with some important infos missing (which is a usability disaster).
Only once you move the mouse to one of those two areas, a stuttery animation with z-buffer flickering issues enlarges that area somewhat to show all relevant info.
Pages further down in the navigation order look bad, because the diagonal divider cross the navigation list, and some of the background images in mouse-not-on-the-screen state are behind the navigation, and since they have the same brightness level, the navigation is difficult to read.
The screen order includes a splash page. This is bad design because the user has no options where to go next. The button icon to proceed is also misleading: it's a round button with a down arrow.
Yes, yes, yes. I don't know who started this horrible trend but I look forward the time this assault on basic usability gets shelved on the museum of past UX horrors where it belongs.
Please give this website to every designer you know:
The design is baffling. I couldn't figure out how to navigate the page by scrolling, until I gave up and started clicking the links on the right side. I still have no idea what that diagonal line is for.
I was able to figure it out, but it was still annoying. Equally annoying was that it JS-hotlinked each section of the website requiring me to press the back button a million times to get back to the last actual webpage.
Hot-linking is cool, but storing it in the browsing history is not.
I didn't have a problem with it until I read your comment. Then I went back and re-tried it. Somehow, I just couldn't quite wrap my head around how to use it... Perhaps it's the act of me trying to "overthink" how to use the UI as opposed to just using it in what comes natural through innocent exploration.
The problem is that you have to think at all. It should be inherent and automatic for you to navigate where you want to go as a user. If you have to pause to figure out how to use the UI then the designers have failed.
As a photographer, what I really want to know is what characteristics the light field imager has in terms of things like dynamic range, noise, color reproduction, and so on. If the Illum has a unique sort of "flavor," in the same way that Sigma's Foveon series (with its non-Bayer-patterned sensors) has a certain something that's fun for photographers to experiment with, I could see it catching on. Much more so if there are some weird, light-field-based parameters that you can adjust in a Lightroom-esque app from Lytro.
Otherwise, I can't see this thing riding on the appeal of viewer refocusing and tilting – that's just not going to escape the realm of gimmick. Unless the tech offers new creative opportunities to the pro / prosumer photographer, I see that market being less likely to spend $1600 on this than consumers were to spend $400 on the original.
As much as I dislike the stereotypical criticism on HN I agree completely. I still don't know what problem Lytro is trying to solve or what benefit it provides, and I've yet to hear about a successful application in the consumer space. Refocusing after a picture has been taken is interesting, but useless unless your camera/phone/whatever doesn't focus properly.
Depth of field is just one of many tools used to convey a photograph. For $1500 this camera better blow away other prosumer point-and-shoots like the RX100 Mk II, RX10, Ricoh GR, etc. Given the cost of light-field technology I suspect compromises in sensor sensitivity, dynamic range, and ISO will have to be made.
> Refocusing after a picture has been taken is interesting, but useless unless your camera/phone/whatever doesn't focus properly.
Ever try and take a picture of a kid? My Nexus 5's auto-focus can't keep up with my toddler at all. Getting this technology down into a compact shooter or cell phone sized camera would be a huge leap.
You will never get it in a camera the size of a cell-phone camera. This technology relies on the fact that each patch of their lens sees a different image of the subject; it's like stereo, but with a single lens, and many views rather than two. It fundamentally has to have a large-diameter lens.
You will never get it this small/big/fast/powerful/affordable is what has been said about a lot of industries/technologies in the past.
Question is, will Lytro be able to do it? Will they have the money&perseverance? With their financials they are not likely to move fast enough on this, 5mp equivalent in 2014 is not very impressive. I shelved my Lytro v1 after a couple of days because of the poor image quality, not because of the 'gimmick' disappointing me.
Pelican Imaging will be bringing out similar technology in cell phones this year or next. They're using a camera array rather than a single sensor + MLA.
I am not sure what you mean by each lens, since there is only one lens with this technology. The diameter of the lens has to be comparable to the separation between the two lenses in a stereo system. For meaningful stereo effect at distances we would find interesting (say, a few feet between you and your toddler), this has to be maybe an inch; I don't see a smaller lens being very interesting.
For a typical cell phone, the hyperfocal distance - beyond which everything is in focus with the lens focused at infinity - is maybe 6 feet; you can't get light field information, at all, for anything further than that. And it will be only a tiny bit of information for closer subjects; you can't take shallow depth-of-focus photos with a cell phone, and you can't apply this technology for the same reason. BTW, motion blur is likely a bigger problem for cell phone photos than focus.
Almost all DSLRs and I assume many point-and shoots have an automatic focus tracking mode for moving subjects. Canon's is called AI servo. That said, most people don't move beyond the "auto" setting on their high-end cameras, so I can understand the quest to simplify.
Autofocus in smartphones will hopefully get better over time, but if your options are an overall superior DSLR or an equally large camera that just gives you some flexible (albeit one-dimensional) focusing benefits then I think the choice is clear. Practice a little more with your DSLR and wait to see if Lytro can be implanted into a better supporting cast of parts at a reasonable cost.
I have a Canon T3i and 2 young kids. AI servo is the right idea in theory, but on even a lower-end DSLR it just doesn't help much. If a kid is running towards the camera, it will keep refocusing as the subject moves, but it's always focusing on where the kid was a split second ago.
IIRC the higher-end cameras have algorithms to track the subject and predict where the subject WILL be and focus accordingly. However, I have many friends with Mk III's and they say it's a very hard problem that even the high-end DSLR's don't solve. As you can imagine it's not actually a solvable problem with the present AF latencies as the subject can change course after the algorithm guesses. And when you're shooting shallow DoF even a small mistake will kill the focus on the shot.
The question is whether the Lytro can operate at 1/200 or faster to solve that problem. The specs say 1/4000 is max shutter speed, but IIRC the actual capture speed isn't that fast...
I'd guess that there's more benefit than just refocusing as a post process. This camera ships with a relatively wide aperture lens. Wide apertures are great for low light but they also have a very small focal range. I'd guess that with this type of sensor you could use the lens wide open but not be limited to a very narrow focal depth. This could allow you to take shots in low light that you wouldn't normally be able to get. Macro photography also has problems with focusing. You might be able to put a macro lens on here and take one picture completely in focus instead of combining a series of shots in photoshop.
I agree that focusing after the fact has limited appeal, but there are some interesting long-term ramifications of this technology.
Today, much of lens correction are done in hardware, by adding more lens elements, which makes the hardware larger, heavier and more expensive. Some corrections can be done in software these days (barrel/pincushion distortion, chromatic aberration), but not all.
What they've been able to do with this camera is move a lot of those corrections into software, allowing them to use a simpler, cheaper lens with a very large aperture. The constant F/2 aperture is unheard of in a lens with such a large zoom range.
Besides aberrations, there's another issue with using traditional large-aperture lenses: focusing takes time, and it's not always accurate. With the Lytro, I imagine that you can take pictures instantly without needing to focus, and you can get perfect focus in post-processing.
From what I've seen in the sample gallery, image quality isn't great compared to regular camera/lens combinations in the same price range. This camera might not be for everyone, but I really hope the technology continues to improve and eventually become mainstream.
I had a Lytro when it first came out and returned it a week later.
This was the exact reason why. The refocusing aspect sounded useful and appealing at first but the lack of other features quickly made the device lose real-world applications.
This new one looks much cooler/normal and offers more features hw/sw wise but with that price tag I am not sure who their target market is.
I'm interested in the technical aspects too. The Lytro website and Engadget article have very little detailed information. Plenoptic cameras aren't a new idea...so why don't Canon and Nikon have products in this category? As mentioned by others, the camera has an effective resolution of about 5MP, but I suspect there are other limitations. This seems like it might be a Foveon situation; cool, promising technology. I'm not sure why everyone here expects it to be ready now for adoption. It might be a bad business move to mislead people at this point with what is really a niche product.
The light field technology has a lot of interesting applications outside of photography as such. I see a lot of sceptical comments here about the potential of this tech for creative or artistic purposes, and I wanted to comment that it has been the subject of a lot of research in computer vision.
Basically, the light field lets you reconstruct a series of images of your subject as seen from every patch of your lens. Of course, for subjects not at infinity, this means multi-view images. This enables
(a) 3D reconstruction, by multi-view matching and having precisely known geometry.
(b) segmentation, by using 3D reconstruction as mentioned above.
(c) Super-resolution, again by multi-view matching, which can let you get back some of the resolution you lost by capturing the image as a "light field" (which means that your sensor can tell which direction the rays hitting it come from - it's done by having an array of lenses in front of the sensor, each covering a patch).
Better segmentation of the image enables all sorts of higher computer vision algorithms.
Whether this technology is any good as a consumer photography product, I am not the one who can say.
Another interesting application is as a display. A display w/ a lens array to pixel configuration matching the one of the sensor is able to re-create the light field for 3d viewing.
Well, refocusing is what the marketing and the reviews of this camera focus on (ha, I kill me...), but personally I find the 3D possibilities a lot more interesting. On their not-very-usable website, the refocused shots with most of the image blurry look like gimmicks, while the ones with a 3D effect (they are reconstructing the view from different points on the surface of the lens, letting our point of view move around the scene a little bit) look more promising. I don't know if I would buy the camera just for that as a consumer; to me personally, it would be more interesting in a computer vision product.
Returning to the focus, it's true that this has some potential to turn the photographer adage "f/8 and be there" into "f/2 and be there", letting you keep more of the light while the subject is still in focus. However, this is not automatic, since multi-view matching has to be done to superimpose the images of the subject captured from different points of the lens; and this will bring in the difficulties we have with stereo matching, such as occlusions (some parts of the subject can be seen from one point of the lens, but not from another), or ambiguities (it's hard for an algorithm to tell which points of the pictures correspond to the same point of the subject).
I worked on light fields at MIT and I'm a huge fan of this kind of tech. However, as others have said, the product story is lacking. No one cares about after-the-fact focusing as Lytro has always presented it.
A consumer novelty / gimmick won't sell hardware when there are already plenty of smartphone apps that will let you take and share photos in a gimmicky way.
If you want everyday consumer use, make a better camera for taking pictures and video of pets and kids. Make the camera that doesn't stop to focus. Make the camera with one button you hold down to open the shutter, and the camera does the rest (you can select the best shot later). You have to be better than a smartphone camera app, which is hard because smartphone photography is getting very, very good. Camcorders and GoPros in the $500-$1000 range are also very, very good. You'd have to be cheaper and more convenient with similar or better quality.
If you want professional use, you'll have to talk about the optics and image quality, or at least the artistic qualities of the result. Your software should fit into the pro's pipeline and produce a unique result of lasting value. The hardware can be expensive if necessary to meet this goal.
You probably know that light field tech can be used for selectable depth-of-field or extended depth-of-field at large apertures. In other words, it can make a camera that doesn't need to focus, even in low light when you want the lens wide open to minimize noise. Why Lytro chose to market it as a selectable DoF thing is baffling to me. My 2011 post on G+ got their attention[1] and they promised that an "all in focus" mode was coming soon. IIRC they did eventually ship it for their first camera, and for all I know this new one supports it too. But they're moving way too slowly and the website here makes the camera look like a concept rendering -- I was shocked to find in these comments a link to a hands-on with the thing at Engadget.
The killer app for professionals would be shooting video. You could eliminate the job of the "focus puller" in a live action video shoot and "focus" on the performances during the shoot, knowing you could pull focus (and extract 3D info!) in postproduction.
I told them as much when I talked to the CTO [0] at a presentation he gave at the UW [1]. I also wanted frame sync so I could use it with other cameras. And an external trigger (for wildlife, stop motion and true binocular vision). And the ability to send 3d animated random dot stereo gram gifs directly to instagram so I can boost my Klout score.
I think this is aimed squarely at professional use. All the examples were "you can't do this with your camera". The fact that chromatic aberration can be fixed by the computer means the lens needs only 11 pieces to do 8x zoom from 30-250mm and a 1:3 macro, and weighs only half a pound. In an interview with Engadget, Rosenthal said "We think a new shooting style should naturally evolve... to hold the camera around hip height." http://www.engadget.com/2014/04/22/lytro-illum/ You can embed an interactive image on a webpage and let people play with the composition of your photo, making a dynamic interactive artwork. Maybe it's not a huge market, but I can imagine a lot of artists being very excited about the potential.
> "We think a new shooting style should naturally evolve... to hold the camera around hip height."
I've a Panasonic G1, with an LCD that has multiple degrees of freedom (regular hinge, and then another hinge perpendicular to it). It's the best feature ever. It has allowed me to "unglue" the camera from my eye, and shoot from wherever I like.
Overhead, from the hip, from the side, way out over the handrail - if my arm can reach there, I can shoot from that place.
Looks very compelling to me, I love the explorable images -- and adding fast zoom lens and a hotshoe (and 4" touch screen) make it far more useful than the first model.
My big issue is resolution -- they talk about a "40 megaray" sensor (which I'll take to be a 40MP sensor with custom microlenses). The question is how many MP does that effectively translate to (e.g. how large an image can I display). I suspect it's significantly shy of 4K, and quite possibly lower than 1080P.
Note that the original camera had an 11 "megaray" lens. So that suggests a rough doubling of linear resolution -- good but not great.
It seems to me that resolution is an obvious question, and it was a major shortcoming of the original camera (your photos were essentially tiny). Why not address this head-on?
From DPreview: resolution is apparently 5 megapixels. So significantly better than 1080p (2mp) but less than 4k (8mp). So the resolution seems to scale fairly linearly with the "ray count".
Assuming they move to 4:3 that would be around 1800p. That's pretty darn good, and likely would look perfectly OK slightly upscaled to 4K (assuming that's 1800p and sharp).
The problem I would have with a camera like this is it breaks my workflow, built around Lightroom, Photoshop, etc. that is probably even more true of real pro photographers.
The camera itself is beautiful! It looks like a blackmagic design cinema grown up.
I think they would probably do better as a "designed for rental" vs purchased camera, though. It is enough of a novelty that I'd see people using it for a few shoots, but like a tilt shift lens, it is only going to be daily useful to a limited number of people. Especially with limited production, rental would rock --- either direct, or throug something like borrowlenses or lumoid.
Additionally, Lytro has worked out a deal with Adobe and Apple so you can transfer those images to Lightroom, Photoshop or Aperture if you wish to work on them after you've adjusted the image's focus and depth of field to your heart's desire.
Thanks! I think this was the most interesting part of the interview:
Q: This is a very versatile lens - a bright, constant aperture, lots of zoom, and 13 elements, which is relatively few for a design like this. How are you able to create something like this?
A: We designed it in-house and worked with a Japanese partner to build it ... This plays directly into one of the cooler parts of light field, which is this ability to use the additional data that we capture to get breakthrough hardware performances. There’s no lens on the market that’s equivalent to this.
The reason is that, in the conventional sense, you would’t be able to deal with the aberration correction you’d need across that long a zoom and that wide an aperture. The typical way you’d deal with aberration correction is with glass elements - traditional optics. Since we capture all of the directional data within the light field, we’re able to do aberration correction in software and computation. It’s the first big example of us trading out physical components of the camera and replacing those with software and computation to give the market something you just couldn’t do conventionally.
I'm surprised that Lytro hasn't commissioned any photographs from any famous photographers to put on exhibit yet at say a MOMA or even something like the California Academy of Arts & Sciences. The reason being that most enthusiasts aren't very excited about bleeding edge technology, as already seen in the comments here. I'm sure the complaints would be worse in a photography forum. Most of them tend to go for tried and true devices. An art commission, possibly with some really large and nice digital photo frames for a gallery, should help mitigate this problem for Lytro and open people's eyes
If I understand this tech correctly, wouldn't the reverse. ie applying the same trick to displays, have a huge impact on VR? Then one could focus ones eyes at the actual distance of the object, instead of constantly infinity, and the DOF effects that occur naturally would also be there.
I don't know how useful this would be for "normal" photography, because choosing the composition, focus, etc is the fun part of the creative process.
But I think it can be awesome for macro photography or anything where you're not in full creative control at the time like those automated wildlife critter cams, balloon/kite/drone photography, selfies, webcam shots, mars rovers...
The angled display and grip is interesting, it hearkens to medium-format viewfinders. For a lot of my photography, I'd be surprised if I'd prefer looking downward rather than at my subject.
Congratulations to Lytro - getting this stuff on the market with increasing quality will change the world, perhaps in ways we don't yet expect.
True, but it produces many different 5MP images. Reading a bit about this it seems unimpressive if you just use it to produce static images; It seems more to deliver on the promise of the holograms you used to be able to buy in stores.
I would appreciate a comparison to their previous camera as to how much better it actually is. There are no actual metrics on that page for me to work with.
I own an original Lytro. I've used it maybe 3 times. Was completely unimpressed. Shifting focus is just not that cool. Especially when it requires special software and plugins to use it. But its been 3 years or so, so perhaps this version is better.
Another product-in-search-of-a-problem from Lytro. It's entirely likely that I'm wrong, but I assume that there are legions of problems to be solved in the machine vision world which Lytro could help solve. For example, could Lytro: help cars see other cars better; improve surveillance capabilities (yes, yes, surveillance is bad); improve robotics; be useful in medical diagnosis (Lytro for x-rays?). I have a friend at Lytro and asked him these questions and his response was basically "no, no, consumer photography is where it's at!"
I do think this should help with some things, certainly. Seems this could much more quickly determine distance between some things than a 3d mapping of items would take.
I would be curious if there are numbers on this regard. But, I don't know any reason right off to dismiss it. It is not that uncommon for photographs to focus on the wrong item. This basically solves that problem, right?
Harsh: agreed; the way I worded that reflected my frustration and was unnecessarily harsh. That said, I am frustrated that what-seems-like-a-great-technology is being used so ineffectively. Lytro was chatting with a car company about using the sensors on their cars and, long time constants aside, that appears to have been for naught.
Photography: the camera on my phone has been good-enough for me for years, so I'm a poor judge of camera needs. But I just haven't heard any photo-nerd complain about the problems with focus on a camera, so I am not sure there is an actual problem here that Lytro is solving.
How do you envision this being better than other sensor technology? Seems that car sensors would be better off just adding additional sensors instead of this. No need to image process to determine distance from items, when you can do a distance sensor, right?
Raytrix has already been doing this: http://raytrix.de, however stereo-cams, time of flight, and structured light approaches are usually more effective. You can do everything you can do with a light-field array camera with 3+ lenses and some clever algorithms.
Correction: you can do everything Lytro is doing with lightfields with 3+ lenses and some clever algorithms. Lightfields are incredibly useful rich 4d datasets with massive potential (would you like a side of automatic shader generation with your 3d scan?) but Lytro is totally blowing it by focusing (no pun intended) on this trivial little aspect of it.
I like that they can use software in the camera to cut glass out of the lens. I have some pretty hefty glass, and if this is executed right (quality wise) it could be a big win -- even if they fix the focus like a traditional camera.
From one of their videos, they emphasize that the point is not necessarily refocusing still photos, but producing interactive still photo end-user experiences. That's a very intriguing idea to me.
Making tools that were expensive or difficult to use, inexpensive and easy to use, means that scientists and students can make use of them to discover and invent the things you suggest.
The first thought I had when I saw the new Google Camera app was "wow, this might kill that light field camera thing that came out a couple of months ago that I haven't heard of since". I then installed Google Camera, had a play, and it confirmed my thoughts. The new Google Camera app is awesome and it works with my current phone. Extra hardware to carry around = zero.
The original Lytro was a cool idea, but I think the slow time-to-market caused it a dragged out death. Google put the last bullet in.
The difference is that Google's effect is faked in software and relies on the huge depth of field of a tiny sensor. The Lytro actually does what Google is simulating.
That's like saying my MP3 player from the early 2000s had a microphone and cost $200, so why would anyone buy thousands of dollars of professional audio equipment anymore to record music?
>> The Lytro actually does what Google is simulating.
But wait a second. We're talking about the Google Camera lens blur function, right? That feature is only really simulating out of focus blur, which is not really the same as what Lytro does.
What Lytro does more akin to focus bracketing, isn't it?
Right. What I meant was that when the Lytro's image is 'focused' on a subject, the background actually is out of focus instead of just having a fancy blur algorithm run on it to simulate being out of focus.
Well, but maybe it's possible to make a compromise? I mean, for a stationary subject the Google approach (camera movement) and the Lytro approach (microlens array) captures the same data (with the caveat that Google apparently only uses a linear path).
I could imagine a system which captures a whole lot of frames with some camera shake, identifies which parts of it moved, and then computes "real" lightfield bokeh for the stationary background while filling in with just image-space blur for the gaps.
It's definitely expensive, and it has been slow to iterate. But the nasty-looking fake bokeh produced by Google's app doesn't even make conventional large sensor cameras obsolete. This thing is actually pretty impressive and lets you do stuff you cannot do with any other camera.
>> But the nasty-looking fake bokeh produced by Google's app doesn't even make conventional large sensor cameras obsolete.
The thing is, the fake bokeh is nasty looking to people who know how to judge bokeh, which is a fairly small portion of camera phone users. To most of them, it's probably good enough for what they are trying to accomplish. And in that regard, while it won't make a conventional large sensor camera obsolete, it'll still have enough people saying "my smartphone can do that, why would I bother buying a big camera that doesn't fit in my pocket?"
>> This thing is actually pretty impressive and lets you do stuff you cannot do with any other camera.
I agree with this, but I often wonder if the Lytro is a solution looking for a problem.
Hate that you are getting downvoted, as I think this is actually a discussion that needs to happen. Many people will have a hard time distinguishing these technologies. Especially on paper.
My take is that this camera will have some major advantages in shutter speed and quickly taking successive pictures.
As an example, at my child's soccer practice, it is not uncommon to fire off about 5 shots in any 2 second interval. It is also not uncommon to have 4 of those shots be out of focus. Heck, all five.
This camera could solve that. The phone solution fails, as I can't take that many pictures that quickly.
>> As an example, at my child's soccer practice, it is not uncommon to fire off about 5 shots in any 2 second interval. It is also not uncommon to have 4 of those shots be out of focus.
I'm not sure Lytro's necessarily the right the solution for this either, at least not today.
I know I'll get laughed at and mocked for saying this, but I bought an inexpensive Nikon One camera for a very similar use case. I got tired of carrying my DSLR around on doggie play dates, and while the Nikon One may suck at an incredibly long list of things, the one thing it still does better than just about every other mirrorless camera out there (even with the Fuji XT1 and Sony A6000 now on sale) is AF on moving subjects. It can track a dog running towards me (the hardest part about AF in this use case) just about as well as my DSLR.
If you don't believe me about the moving subject AF, Thom Hogan agrees:
Oh, I should have made this clearer. I have not used this camera. I have tried my camera phone in frustration a few times, but I am usually only happy with the shots I get from my DSLR. To the point that I picked up a used 5D Mark II. I'm very happy with this camera, but getting focus on far away shots with a zoom can be difficult. Solving that would be nice.
Which is why I think this conversation needs to happen. I'm not sure what the benefits are. I'm just not dismissive, either. Nor do I think the camera phone will completely destroy the DSLR any time soon.
(I do think it will eventually happen. Maybe not the camera phone, per se, but camera sensors could advance such that having many different cameras will be for novelty more than utility.)
The 5DMKII isn't going to win any awards in AF speed (it is still a great camera, imo) but you can do some stuff to mitigate your issues. Try shooting with a smaller aperture to get more depth of field, and consider learning how to manually zone focus. If you know the distances for which your lens is "in focus" for a particular aperture, and can evaluate how far away your subjects are, you might get better results. I think this is how they did this in the "good old days".
It is more work, requires learning (I think it's a useful skill, but that's just me), but if you've got AF limitations and don't want to throw money at the problem (i.e., get an MKIII), it doesn't hurt to try.
Oh, certainly! Learning to use my camera has been paying dividends that I can't really explain. I expect I'll keep getting better.
Biggest thing for me to learn now is how to work with a zoom lens. Then, get a better one. (Well, I say zoom, I really just mean telephoto. Right now I have a zoom one, but expect to move to a prime one eventually.)
And I think you are dead on, learning how they did things in the "good old days" is a huge skill that has been helping a lot. Things are a little tougher when my child is effectively running around at random right now. I expect that to change, as well.
The "big trick" to sports photography has always been learning the sport, and that's only a little less crucial now with, say, a 1DX or a D4/D4S than it was back in my manual-focus days. However, that's not going to be of much help when the kids you're photographing don't know the sport. Expect a comparatively large number of failed shots, and learn to laugh. A 400/2.8 L isn't going to help a whole lot until there's some statistically-valid chance of anticipating the action. (And it's godawful heavy and awkward as well as really good used car expensive.) As your photography develops and your athlete develops, you'll know when (or if) it's time to go for the big guns. In the meantime, a fast 70-200 (with a good teleconverter for some shot types) will fill the bill, and unless you're printing huge, don't be afraid to crank the ISO a bit to keep the shutter speed down. (Look at the pictures, not the pixels. There ought to be some sort of license required to zoom in to 100%.)
I've definitely learned this one the hard way. At first I was excited about having everything at super low ISO. Now, I take a few quick shots to see what the lowest I can get away with and still get quick pictures.
Heck, often times I'm happy to just take videos. Really liking how well they turn out with this camera.
Actually, if you're on a soccer field, and the kids are far enough away, there's a good chance they're focused at infinity anyways, so you may not even need to focus (although your camera should be set to MF) as long as you've got the aperture small enough to give you wiggle room on the DOF.
The Lytro still needs to be focused; the trick it uses is to focus to the hyperfocal distance as you zoom, and then it can capture the equivalent of focus stacking fore and aft of that point; but only on a finite number of focal planes ( fewer than 6 if I recall ).
So... your photos could end-up being nearly in focus, but also lacking in detail ( low-res sensor ) and blown-out ( poor dynamic range ).
That makes sense. I'd be curious to know of any wiggle room available in that regard. Seems it would be nice to do a few focal points that are "close" to each other near where you are focused, combined with a few far away ones. If that makes sense. Would make it possible to do sort of HDR images from a single shot, right?
And, regardless of that, this still goes a much farther way towards "solving" this problem than the camera phone. Right?
The simplest solution to your soccer practice photography dilemma is to get a camera that can focus quickly enough (or maybe to learn how to zone focus). There are many cameras that can do this, but the problem is that none of them are a smartphone.
As I noted in the sibling post, I have a decent enough (I think it is a dang good one, actually) camera for this. Right now, I just need more practice with my tools. We have only done three practices, my daughter is only four. :)
The example was more to get an idea of what this could help with. In short, if you are taking pictures of things in motion, or multiple shots in succession, the camera app that was recently displayed is nigh useless. Right?
The 5D Mark II is an awesome camera in a lot of ways but it has fairly slow autofocus speed for a camera in its class.
It is outpaced quite a bit by even "lesser" (more consumer oriented) cameras like the 70D (though as with anything this is a trade-off since the 70D is a cropped-sensor, so IQ not quite as good under ideal situations, worse low-light performance, etc).
Here's a photo I took a couple of months ago with the 70D, one of a series of 5 that were all pretty well focused (considering the subject was a cheetah running at nearly full speed) using the "AI Servo" autofocus mode:
(To be fair, such photos still aren't exactly point and shoot on my 70D, you have to be fairly decent at panning at that speed)
You do have a point though in that the current situation for me is needing to have multiple cameras (70D for fast action, Sony A7 for relatively still shots with very high image quality, Canon EOS M for carrying around everywhere). I don't think this Lytro comes anywhere close to changing that situation, though computational imaging in general will probably solve the issue eventually.
Yeah, I don't fully understand the tradeoffs yet. I know that it has much better noise level than my last rebel. And the full frame sensor is very nice. (Though, now I want a good 50mm lens).
I'm definitely game for any advice I can get. I hate that I let that example detract from the discussion, which is for average photographers, something like this could help a lot. Doesn't sound like it is fully there, yet. But it is promising. Especially in tandem with the app idea. Exciting times are ahead for getting folks into photography.
The "old" Lytro had a very small sensor. To be able to experience any control over DOF you had to challenge yourself to create compositions that would include objects of interest both close and far away to be able to even play with "the effect". For my shooting style the technology was totally pointless. Pictures with objects of interest at 1.5 meters up to infinity were sharp all over the place anyway.
Perhaps this new thing will bring something new to the scene. But at 5 MP it feels immature. The technology friendly photographers it could attract are usually not so hot on bridge cameras with huge zoom lenses. Perhaps a fixed lens (or 24-50mm equiv) would have been a better choice.
I suspect this will be the same. I think the future of focus control might lie in Google's new camera app[1] and phones with dual cameras. Just give them some raw format love (like the 1020 got).
I'm interested in the technology, but I feel it's lacking a real use case for me.
I really like the sample images where you can perspective shift slightly. So what I'd like to see is a two camera/sensor setup to capture a 3D image.
I can then take the result, stick my Oculus Rift on and view the result. The perspective shift lets me move my head around a bit.
Better yet, stick more sensors on, capture as wide a field of view as possible (closer to 360 the better), and recreate the whole scene in a Rift compatible viewer. You wouldn't have to move around, just have enough of the scene that you can look a bit to the left and right. It would let you feel like you are there to a greater degree. I'd buy something like this for sure.
I'm surprised no one's mentioned the similarity to the hologram photography. To me this seems like capturing refocus-able hologram with photographic quality. And once the technology progresses enough it will also be able to produce quality stills (this version is fine for smaller prints already) of printable size.
All in all it seems like a nice step forward in camera technology that supports and simplifies traditional camera technology (allowing simpler, and cheaper, lens for example) while adding a new way to be creative (Light field effects) and maintaining quality.
I don't, however, see it fundamentally changing photography. Just a nice new technology that will pave the way for the next 20 years of camera advances.
This just occurred to me.... There's a fundamental problem with the oculus rift and video content: in order to prevent VR sickness, you need at least enough of a 3d scene to enable head movements within a small volume. Because traditional cameras, including binocular cameras, don't capture a true 3d scene this is impossible. 3d from a camera in the rift will be as bad as the current 3d displays.
But the Lytro can capture an actual 3d scene right? So maybe the Lytro is the perfect companion to the oculus rift. The field of view will be limited (like looking through a window) but at least it will be true 3d and could respond correctly to head movements!
maybe the design of the website is subpar/a little annoying, but the actual object, the camera is actually beautiful.
I think it's very well designed (aesthetically and functionally) -- with any camera, you're going to spend quite a bit of time looking down at the physical thing, tilted downwards in your hand, trying to see if you got a good shot (looking at the preview), I think the design is a pretty bold move towards better practical usability.
I definitely agree (as functionally, it's indisputable there are more viewing angles on a fold out screen), but some are not fans of fold out screens, and it is one more moving part.
Also I didn't mention it before, but I think the whole design has a more natural grip
You can't compromise image quality for some gimmick!
A conventional lens will let you take an all-in-focus portrait, and we have increasingly seen that digital techniques produce a similar if not better image on cellphones.
If I take a photo, I'm not going to distribute the image in a proprietary format to allow refocusing. That leaves using it as a way to fix mistakes -- which, as you become better at photography, become less worth it.
Light-field cameras might gain ground in the future, but photographers can be a conservative bunch. The current top of the line professional cameras are astoundingly similar to the film cameras they replaced, and not for lack of manufacturers trying.
That said, looks at first glance like an innovative product- If someone can post a link to a website for mere mortals that describes the camera's features I might actually read about what it can do.