Remember When Foveon Was The Coolest Thing To Happen To Photography?

now lytro is the coolest thing to happen to photography

[lawman]

[content.usatoday.com...]

if one Silicon Valley startup has its way, the very idea of focusing, or adjusting light levels, or having to wait before you click the shutter, will be a relic of the early 21st century -- along, perhaps, with photos that only exist in two dimensions.

What happened to Foveon anyway. ;)

[Leosghost]

The lytro examples show foreground and background as separate focal planes but between them if you click the focus does not change..eg; in the "wire fence" photo the player to the left with the ball ( middle distance ) is not focused separately from the the players in front of the net..this is not multi focus..this is foreground and background focus ..

Same on all their examples on their site ..the spear point ( foreground ) is in focus ..or the spear wielder is in focus ..but the building behind him is unchanged and does not focus when clicked on ..

Not variable focus ..just playing with DOF within a very tight area ..DOF choice already gives you approximately 33% in front of focal point and and 66%.. behind..

In each of the Lytro images you cannot get the furthest object into focus..be it the shelves on the wall behind the glass vessels in the lab ..or the furthest model in the red dress, in the group of models shot.

Interesting ..but not spectacular ..and the fact it requires flash to do something that can already be done with DOF bracketed shots that are then displayed in flash movies, means it is restricted to devices that can play flash movies anyway.

I suspect Adobe , Canon, Nikon et al won't be having any sleepless nights over this..

Plus bokeh is a good thing.

[graeme_p]

I was able to focus on three or even four distinct distances on several of the photos in the demo.

Assuming these are all taken with a single exposure, it is pretty impressive. Imagine every photo you take being quadruply depth of field bracketed in the same instant.

You can then adjust focus when you get back. Displaying it on the web using flash (or HTML 5) is just a demo. The point is that you decide where you need to focus after taking the photo, and DOF bracketing is unnecessary. This is especially useful for things that happen too fast to bracket.

[incrediBILL]

As a photographer that's about the coolest thing I've ever seen.

Frame the scene, shoot, forget depth of field until you review 'em later.

Not only that, you could easily merge multiple depths of field in PhotoShop bringing multiple layers into focus from a single image.

Oh how much time that will save!

The only question now is how good are the optics and image quality overall.

[lawman]

More pix to play with:

[digitaltrends.com...]

Scroll down for the pix and click on the link at the end for even more.

[graeme_p]

This is also cool [digitaltrends.com ]. A camera for infra-red photos.