There is a lot of excitement about Silicon Valley company Lytro and its new take on photography – its Light Field technology allows different parts of a taken picture to be shifted in and out of focus.
The company held a news conference in San Francisco this morning to unveil its first camera, which it said would go on sale next year, starting at $400. A live blog of the event is after the jump.
11.30am Ren Ng, the CEO and founder is introduced and he tells us he is going to show us the first Light Field camera, he describes this as Camera 3.0 after film and digital photography.
11.35am He described how he spent $30,000 in 2004 to develop a camera that could make pictures with adjustable focus – a development of his work at Stanford. Shoot first, focus later, is the idea.
11.40am We’re shown various photos of in and out of focus shots – raindrops on a New York hotel window in focus are switched to a sharp focus on the previously blurry skyscrapers outside. There is creative potential here for professional photographers and interactive living pictures to make for the rest of us.
11.45am So we get to see the first consumer camera. It’s an unusually shaped orange and black compact affair like a long perfume box, with an 8x optical zoom. Inside there is a Light Field Sensor that captures 11m rays of light. There is a glass colour touchscree, a shutter button and zoom slider on the outside. Two other colours are graphite grey and a fetching Electric Blue for its aluminium skin, which is combined with a rubber grip. There is instant-on, instant-shutter picture taking, but no flash included. There is a USB port hidden behind a door for transferring pictures.
11.55am How do you share these pictures? Fill in a box in Lytro’s software to upload to Lytro.com where the photos can be viewed. Or share them on Facebook, they appear in the newstream and can be played with in terms of zooming in and moving parts of the picture in and out of focus.
12pm Memory is 8Gb or 16Gb, the camera has a long-life lithium ion battery , shipping starts in early 2012, cameras can be preordered on Lytro.com from today. It’s a truly revolutionary product, says Ren, so how should we price it? The speculation is $999, he says. But it will be $399, he says, for the 8Gb version, $499 for 16Gb – the Red Hot colour I thought was orange. The blue and grey ones are 8Gb versions.
12.05pm So that’s it. I’m not convinced this is as desirable as Lytro thinks this is. It could become as trendy for digital pictures as the Flip did for video with consumers, but $400 is a lot for a fairly basic camera beyond the focussing tricks. I’d like to see the technology built in as an option on regular cameras. Maybe that’s where Lytro’s future lies. Off to see a demo now.
Postscript: I’m a little more impressed, Lytro has an excellent 3D capability as well. I spoke to the designer, held the camera and tried taking pictures. It still seems a little gimmicky taking square pictures framed by its touchscreen, but the engineering and quality of the product is excellent. There is an unusual ridged rubber slider for zooming in and it really does turn instantly on and off. The processing of the photo for different focuses also seems fast.
