Forceflow said:
Actually Adobe implemented something like that on a modern graphics card a year back already. They were able to implement this feature by utilizing the GPUs in a PC. And the image that they used was taken on a real sized (16MP) sensor...
That's right, here's a short video of the keynote:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZ6EHhsLk74
If you are interested in the subject you can find more links on Todor Georgiev's website (
http://www.tgeorgiev.net/), for example the excellent (although rather technical) presentation on
http://nvidia.fullviewmedia.com/gtc2010/0922-c-2093.html.
No, the light field technique is not a camera by itself. Also, Adobe has a different approach than Lytro. Basically an array of lenses or microlenses splits your image into smaller ones, which are all captured in a single frame on the CCD/CMOS sensor. From the "raw" file different images can be reconstructed later by applying one or more of the rendering algorithms. Choosing the focus is just one calculation you can apply; this is probably essential because of lack of on-camera focus controls. Additional effects are choosing a different viewpoint (parallax), making a stereo/3D image, choosing depth of field, HDR, polarization, and super resolution (which means you go one step further and regard every camera lens as a microlens).
The Raytrix R11 which delivers 3mp images costs $30.000 (source:
http://www.popsci.com/gadgets/article/2011-05/cameras-40000-lenses-help-salvage-blurry-images). That makes the 1mp Lytro sound like a steal at $400, but like they say themselves: "The Lytro is designed for online sharing and interaction with living pictures", so I wouldn't expect too much of their first generation cameras.
What makes me say the Lytro is a 1 megapixel camera? If you examine their website source you can find json resources with links to 1024x1024 images, e.g.
http://s3.amazonaws.com/lytro-s3-prod/assets/0c0e2cd4-f927-11e0-849a-123139407c18/output.html5.image--5.98.jpg. But they could of course have been resized or cropped.
archangelrichard said:
NO you can't add it to any existing system of photography. NO, you really wouldn't want to (less than 1 MP?)
Yes you can:
http://www.raytrix.de/index.php/RX_en.html, but I don't think you want to (pricey, probably a permanent mod and also loss of lens interchangeability).
