It takes pictures that allow you to focus after the picture was taken. It also adds a sense of dimensionality to photos- so that you can move the subject around a little bit, giving off the effect of a change in perspective… It’s pretty wild tech, not to mention the beautiful hardware.
Amazing tech. I wish they’d done something a bit more traditional with the body, but considering the paradigm shift this thing could be, it’s appropriate.
Wow, I want one! Both the software and the hardware look amazing.
I love the shape and design of the body, I love that it’s not a traditional body although my bet is tha the technology will obviously be introduced and licensed so that it can be incorperated into tradional bodies.
Yeah, so they got me with the tech, but dropped the ball on the delivery. Such a bummer. If they’d made the pricepoint 2-3 hundred dollars more, and added a bit more to the system as a whole they’d really have been on to something.
It’s new tech, it’ll eventually improve but I guess for now they have to start getting some income for the R&D spent. It’s marketed more for interactive internet photos vs DSLR crowd, hence they don’t use megapixel and similar jargon. I remember Adobe making a similar idea with a lens with a bunch of individual lens on it. Was about 3 years ago or so when I last heard of it. Had to dig for it but here it is: http://www.geekologie.com/2008/02/adobe-to-start-making-hardware.php
I was wondering about the output of it. What a bummer. I cant do much with a 1080x 1080 image. That lightfield ‘image’ must be packed with information on it. Each image would be roughly 23 megs (8000megs/300 images). Seems like a lot of hassle for no real output.
I think they got the business model wrong. It’s really cool cutting edge technology. Get pictures with the information on the direction of the light. I think going after the general consumer market wasn’t the right choice. Especially since the big push was towards their live pictures that would allow you, in a web browser to to move the focus point in the image. It was all really a gimmick… not to mention couldn’t be shared well on social media.
I think they were afraid of going up against the standard camera market as they knew they wouldn’t be able to get the image quality. Maybe that could have made it for video - pulling focus in video is a true headache.
With that said, they seem to be pulling away from the consumer market and have found a use for the technology in VR. https://www.lytro.com/
They’re probably right in their assessment that Google would rather have the IP and some key employees and thats about it. Your valuation doesn’t mean much when the business has failed, I actually didn’t even realize they were still around.