Magazine: TR10
Light-Field Photography
Lytro reinvented the camera so that it can evolve faster.
- May/June 2012
- By Tom Simonite
This March brought the first major update to camera design since the dawn of cheap digital photography: a camera that lets you adjust the focus of an image after you've taken the picture. It is being sold for $399 and up by Lytro, a startup based in Silicon Valley that plans to use its technology to offer much more than the refocusing trick—options like making 3-D images at home.
All consumer cameras create images using a flat plate—whether chemical film or a digital sensor—to record the position, color, and intensity of the light that comes through a lens. Lytro's camera does all that, but it also records the angle at which rays of light arrive (see graphic). The resulting files aren't images but mini-databases capturing the three-dimensional pattern of light, called a light field, at a particular moment. Software can mine that database to produce many different possible photos and visual effects from one press of the shutter.
To read the entire article you must log in:
Most of our content — all daily news, blogs, and videos — is free. Magazine stories are paid. To read this story, you must have a subscription or you must use a reading credit. Registration to Technology Review is free and entitles registrants to three free reading credits.
On Twitter
Become a Fan on Facebook
Subscribe to the Feed