Lytro Camera - Take picture, then focus.

[Sledgstone 8,672]

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20122734-264/lytro-unveils-radical-new-camera-design/

Get ready for camera 3.0. Because next year, you might have to decide whether an 11-megaray sensor is enough for your new light-field camera.

Lytro, a Silicon Valley startup, today unveiled its radical new camera--also called the Lytro. With it, the company hopes to rewrite the rules with a technology called light-field photography, but the scale of the company's ambition is matched by the scale of its challenge.

On the outside, the Lytro looks different--a smooth, two-tone elongated box 4.4 inches long and 1.6 inches square. At one end is the lens and at the other is an LCD touch-screen display; along the sides are power and shutter buttons, a USB port, and a touch-sensitive strip to move the F2 lens through its 8X zoom range.

There are three models--the $399 cameras with "electric blue" and "graphite" exteriors whose 8GB of built-in memory is enough for about 350 shots and the "red hot," 16GB camera that can record 750 shots, Chief Executive Ren Ng told CNET in an interview today. U.S. residents can buy one now, through Lytro's Web site only, though they won't ship until the first quarter of 2012.

It's a striking industrial design for those accustomed to cameras festooned with buttons, protruding lenses, scroll wheels, and knobs. But the biggest differences are on the inside.

Conventional digital cameras use lenses to focus a subject so it's sharp on the image sensor. That means that for an in-focus part of the image, light from only one direction reaches the sensor. For light-field photography, though, light from multiple directions hits each patch of the sensor; the camera records this directional information, and after-the-shot computing converts it into something a human eye can understand.

The result is that a Lytro camera image is a 3D map of whatever was photographed, and that means people can literally decide what to focus on after they've taken the photo.

"Camera 1.0 was film. Camera 2.0 was digital," said Ng, who worked on the technology at Stanford University before founding Lytro, originally called Refocus Imaging, in 2006. "3.0 is a light-field camera that opens all these new possibilities for your picture taking."

The biggest such possibility Ng points to is that an image becomes more dynamic. With the camera, a photographer looking at the screen can change the focus point. In one demonstration, the image shows the droplets of water on the window at one moment and the New York skyline from the same image at the next moment.

The interactivity is not limited to the camera. Software included on it lets people do the same operation on computers, with images hosted for free at Lytro's Web site, or embedded in Facebook pages. Only a Mac application will be available at launch, though a Windows version is on the way, and Lytro plans viewer apps for mobile phones as well.

Lytro believes the cameras will be be handy for focusing an image after it was taken; you can whip the camera out, turn it on, and snap the shot rapidly without worrying about waiting for an autofocus system to hunt around while the baby's first smile fades away.

"It's got an instant shutter. You press the button--bang! It takes the picture right away," Ng said. "We have that unique feature--shoot first, focus later. The camera doesn't have to physically focus while you take the shot."

The image is ready for refocusing operations immediately after it's taken, the company said. And though people can toy with the image on the 1.46-inch LCD display, they don't need to. That's good, given the limits of such a small view.

Another interesting feature: because the camera captures depth information, Lytro images can be viewed in 3D, something the company demonstrates with 3D TVs. The image information will be recorded for anyone who buys a Lytro camera, but the ability to view the 3D versions will come later with a future version of the company's software.

Click the link for the rest of the article and a video of the camera in action.

Heres the link the for the actual camera:

https://www.lytro.com/camera

Click that link and you'll see sample pictures where you can change the focus on the picture. Its pretty awesome.

[CabbitGirl 4,018]

that's cheating!!! lol but oh man that's so cool