Lytro, after admitting that its overly expensive, low-resolution light field camera was merely a "novelty," has announced its new Illum camera. The Illum is much larger than its predecessor, packing a sensor that's four times the size (40 "megarays"), and an appropriately larger lens in front of that sensor (though the same 8x optical zoom and f/2.0 aperture remain). The Illum also looks a lot like a real DSLR, rather than the rather odd pocket kaleidoscopesque appearance of the original Lytro Camera. The Lytro Illum will be available in July 2014 at a retail price of $1600.
If you don't know what light field photography is, there's a detailed explanation in our feature on Pelican Imaging, which is building light field cameras for smartphones. In short, though, normal digital photography merely captures the intensity of light on a silicon sensor -- light field cameras also capture the direction that the light is moving in. So, a standard digital camera only ever has the flat 2D representation of light that bounces off a scene, while a light field camera captures the entire rays of light -- where they originate from and which direction they're heading in -- that bounce off a scene. If you think of a light field photo as being 3D, much like the Xbox's Kinect sensor, as opposed to a flat 2D photo, that's a fairly accurate (but overly simplistic) description.
As a result, light field cameras don't generate a simple JPEG, but rather a big file full of vectors and other mathematical data. When you want to produce a final photo to share with other people, you use computational photography software to pick a focus point, depth of field, and tilt and shift -- and voila, after some processing, a 2D photo is produced. I encourage you to play with the embedded Lytro Illum images on this page; the ability to refocus images is very dramatic.
Along with the 40-megaray sensor in the Illum, Lytro's new camera has a 4-inch articulated touchscreen and a quad-core Snapdragon SoC. That juicy processing power is used to provide real-time scene analysis, outlining people and objects. It isn't clear if you can do the final processing on the camera, or whether you need to use the accompanying software for iOS, OS X, and Windows. Lytro says the lens is capable of "extreme close-focus macro" photography, but doesn't provide any exact details.
While the original Lytro Camera was basically an executive toy that demonstrated the wonders of light field photography, the Illum looks much more like a professional camera, and priced at $1600 it's clearly targeted at creative early adopters. The original Lytro Camera fell flat for a number of reasons, and so it's unsurprising that the company is trying something different with the Illum. One of the biggest problems with the original Lytro was that image quality and resolution was very low, making it unusable for any kind of serious endeavor. The Illum(Opens in a new window), with a better sensor and lens, should fix that problem (and the sample photos look very good indeed).
I'm still not entirely sure if it makes sense to release a bulky, massively expensive camera when digital photography's destiny is clearly very closely tied to thin, light, and cheap smartphones. I think Pelican's approach, which produces a much thinner light field camera module that can fit in a smartphone, is much more likely to make waves than Lytro's large and over-priced machinations. There's also the question of whether people even want to reinvent the photography wheel, when cheap-and-cheerful "refocusing" (selective blur) seems to appease most consumers, without the need for entirely new hardware and software workflows.Tagged In
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