Light Field Technology
I made it a point to visit all of the booths at PhotoPlus Expo looking for new and interesting products.
At the Lytro booth, I learned a new term: Light Field Technology. With this camera, the direction, color and brightness of the light rays are captured by a specialized sensor array. Afterwards, this information can be “processed” to refocus and change perspective.
| The Lytro Illum is a new, second generation camera to capture light field photographs. Lytro refers to these images as “living pictures”.
The Illum is fitted with a 30-250mm zoom lens with f/2 constant aperture. It has a 4″ tiling LCD viewing screen and weighs just over 2 lbs. |
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| The fast f/2 lens provides an 8X zoom range. Images are stored on an SD, SDXC or SDHC card.
The specialized CMOS sensor has ISO range from 80 to 3200. The camera also has built-in WiFi for transferring images directly to a smart device. |
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| You can preview the images on the LCD and immediately see these living pictures as the focus and perspective change.
The LCD is touch sensitive – you can touch the part of the image to refocus. A “Lytro” button displays an overlay on the screen that displays the depth of field of objects, indicating the range of refocus. |
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Use the included Lytro Desktop software to upload to Lytro’s web (no charge) or to Facebook. Viewers can post comments about your pictures on the Lytro Gallery. When you upload, the software creates an animated gif file that animates the refocusing and change of perspective capabilities.
To see this interesting light field technology, visit the Lytro Gallery where you can experiment with these images by moving your mouse over the area to be refocused. I think it’s an amazing technology.
The Illum is available now at a list price of $1599 includes battery and ND filters (since aperture is fixed at f/2).
Written by: Arnie Lee
