Lytro

AllThingsD reports: [edited]

A Mountain View start-up is promising that its camera, due later this year, will bring the biggest change to photography since the transition from film to digital.

The breakthrough is a different type of sensor that captures what are known as light fields, basically all the light that is moving in all directions in the view of the camera. That offers several advantages over traditional photography, the most revolutionary of which is that photos no longer need to be focused before they are taken.

That means that capturing that perfect shot of your fast-moving pet or squirming child could soon get a whole lot easier. Instead of having to manually focus or wait for autofocus to kick in and hopefully centre on the right thing, pictures can be taken immediately and in rapid succession.

Once the picture is on a computer or phone, the focus can be adjusted to centre on any object in the image, also allowing for cool artsy shots where one shifts between a blurry foreground and sharp background and vice versa.

The technology also allows photos to be taken in very low-light conditions without a flash as well as for three-dimensional images to be captured with a single lens. To view photos in full 3D, users still need some sort of 3D display, such as a 3D-enabled phone, PC or television.

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Brett's 2p'orth: If you have any interest in photography, it is worth visiting the site to read the complete article and check out some of the demo images. The video is dull, but informative.

There is another video review available here. (via kate)


thanks to Conrad for the link.
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