Lytro, a Silicon Valley start-up, unveiled its plan to commercialize a light field camera.
What is a light field?
It is the amount of light traveling in every direction through every point in space – it’s all the light rays in a scene.
So how does it work?
Recording light fields requires an innovative, entirely new kind of sensor called a light field sensor. The light field sensor captures the color, intensity and vector direction of the rays of light. This directional information is completely lost with traditional camera sensors, which simply add up all the light rays and record them as a single amount of light.
The two main benefits are: no fuss focus and speed.
Click away. Shoot first, focus after. That’s right, after. You can’t miss.
From sleep to snap in under a second. Instant on. Bye-bye shutter lag.
According to Ren Ng, Founder and CEO of Lytro, the company will commercialize a price competitive light field camera that will fit into a pocket later this year.
Update 2012.03.02: Richard Butler, Digital Photography Review:
And the screen is one of the camera’s great problems. It’s small, low resolution, and suffers from very poor viewing angles. As a result it’s often hard to tell what your images are going to end up looking like.
The square 1.46-inch LCD is limited to a pixel format of 128×128. If that isn’t limiting enough the viewing angles are terrible with dramatic color and contrast shifts. Lytro has gone through all this trouble to take an esoteric technology and build a unique consumer camera, but didn’t think it was worthwhile to equip it with a decent display. Unfortunate.
Engadget:
While the future of 3D is still uncertain, the potential of FPR-based displays is that users can buy a TV and share in cheap passive glasses to be tossed around and shared among friends but the technology does limit the resolution viewable per eye. After watching Blu-ray 3D movies, broadcast 3D TV shows and sporting events, and playing videogames in 3D and have come away with the opinion that it depends on the conditions. In general, high quality sources like Blu-ray 3D movies take the least hit compared to active shutter 3DTVs, since they’re in 1080p the reduction in resolution isn’t particularly noticeable, and after a recent firmware update changed the algorithm for video processing it improved some minor artifacts we’d seen at CES. Sitting up close revealed the aliasing caused by missing pixels, particularly on elements popped up to appear in front of the screen, like the ESPN 3D score bug in the corner and if you’re close enough, there can appear to be lines in the picture.
Two things. Most of us, who have two eyes, watch TV with both eyes. The 3D effect is only there because we have two eyes. What is the use of mentioning what the resolution is to just one eye when almost no one watches TV that way? Instead of getting picky over specifications, which I am also guilty of doing, let’s focus on the experience. Film Patterned Retarder or FPR, in my opinion, is much more comfortable than active shutter and to my eyes I experience 1080p 3D content in 1080p 3D with FPR.
The second objection is similar to the first. As a parent I’m sensitive to how close my children get to the TV. There is an optimum distance: for kids, the farther you are the better! I’m only half joking there, but why would you sit up close? To get a good look at the pixels? Relax, sit back, at the recommended distance, and then let me know what that experience is like.
I’m no fan of 3D since my eyes work well enough with my brain to bring about the desired 3D effect in 2D video content, but if you absolutely must get a 3D TV I highly recommend going for one that has FPR technology.
Engadget:
With all of the major players having adopted the technology, it seems safe to call Pearl E Ink the industry standard. On that front, you won’t really see any major differences between the latest devices. E Ink has its pluses and minuses, to be sure. For clarity, it’s hard to beat, particularly with the latest Pearl technology. To the naked eye, it really does offer up the sort of contrast we’ve become accustomed to reading old timey paper books. The relatively low power consumption of these displays is also a large part of the reason we’re talking about a battery life of a month or two. Of course the Pearl E Ink display has a relatively slow refresh rate and lacks color, the latter of which is certainly a strike against reading comics, children’s books, and many magazines on the device.
E Ink displays consume zero power when content is not changing. You could tear out the E Ink display and leave it on your desk for a very long time, virtually forever. That’s the good part and it might be good enough. For instance, I’m currently reading Paul Allen’s Idea Man. Except for the 16-page photo insert in the middle of the book all 358 pages of the book is black and white text. I’m reading from a real book, but if I had a Kobo eReader, the only difference from a visual point of view would be that the photos would be in black and white. For most of us who read regular books, and by regular I mean books that are composed of mostly if not all text, the E Ink display used in almost all e-readers including the Kobo eReader Touch Edition will be good enough of a reading experience.
Touch versus buttons:
After using the Kobo for an extended period, we actually began to miss the Nook and Kindle’s physical page turn buttons, which make it a lot easier to use the device with a single hand. The zForce infrared touchscreen is responsive, certainly, but doesn’t afford the same sort of accuracy of physical buttons, and attempts at page turn swipes sometimes registered in the opposite direction or not at all — reading for any extended length of time will probably require you to hold the tiny reader in both hands.
It really isn’t about touch versus buttons. The touch implementation on the Kobo eReader Touch Edition is far from perfect from what I can see. If touch on the Kobo was as good as the iPhone’s then I’m sure buttons wouldn’t be missed all that much.
I’m having a lot of fun with macro photography via a loupe using my iPhone 4 and thought I’d share.
For quite some time I’ve been exploring ways to take interesting photographs with my iPhone 4. As some of you may know my iPhone 4 is my only photographic tool for both still pictures and videos. With a Lombart 10x loupe I’ve been fascinated by how things look up close, very close.
Macro photography using a loupe and your iPhone requires some steady hands: the lens on the iPhone 4 needs to be flat to the loupe, which also needs to be held steady. Since the loupe has a narrow opening the iPhone lens has to be exactly centered, unless you’re looking for a vignette look.
This was taken from Paul Allen’s Idea Man. It’s the hardback version. Look at that fibrous texture. I think my reading experience is going to be a bit more organic from now on.
And it’s easy to take close up photos of displays. The photo above clearly shows a RGB stripe sub-pixel structure. The little smudge on the bottom is due to a smudge on the LCD; thankfully it isn’t a defect.
There are some cases with lens attachments you can buy for your iPhone 4, but with a simple loupe and a couple of steady hands you can quickly be up and running with macro photography on your iPhone 4.
John Gruber:
In other words, these unlocked iPhones sold in the U.S. aren’t for the U.S. — they’re for the parts of the world without carrier deals with Apple.
Yes, for those who live in an area that is not serviced by a carrier who has a deal with Apple, this new unlocked GSM iPhone 4 will solve the problem. But I think there’s more to it than that.
An unlocked GSM iPhone 4 is also a boon for travelers. Instead of paying your current locked-in GSM carrier outrageous international calling and data fees, you can simply purchase a prepaid micro-SIM card when you land. If a micro-SIM card is not for sale, just get a regular one and use a micro-SIM cutter.
Now an unlocked iPhone 4 has been available in Hong Kong so in that sense making it available in the US might not seem such a big deal. You can say that it only makes it easier for potential customers in the US to purchase an unlocked iPhone 4. But let’s try to figure out what might behind Apple’s decision to bring one out now, instead of before or later.
The first thing that comes to mind is that June has been, since 2007, the month when new iPhones are made available. Apple wanted to continue in that tradition. But I think that’s too simple.
Let’s assume Apple wants to accelerate the development cycle of the iPhone from once a year to twice a year. The biggest hindrance right now is the two-year carrier ball-and-chain. On the other hand, the iPad’s data plan is month-to-month. And so there is some indication that Apple will be bringing forth a new iPad in September. That would put the iPad development cycle at roughly once per six months. Apple can do this because current iPad users are not tied down and a new one will not cost them an additional early termination fee (ETF). On the other hand, if you cut your shackle too early for a new iPhone, the ETF is hefty.
If a new unlocked contract-free iPhone were available every six months that would put a lot of pressure on Apple’s competitors such as Samsung, HTC, and LG. I think this is exactly what Apple is already doing with the iPad.
Right now there are two iPhone versions based on baseband support: CDMA and GSM. In the very near future I would be surprised if Apple didn’t introduce an iPhone with a single baseband chipset that supports both. That would reduce the cost of manufacturing quite a bit improving profit margins, but just as importantly imagine an unlocked iPhone 4 that can connect to both CDMA and GSM networks.
With an unlocked GSM iPhone 4 the act of purchasing a physical micro-SIM could be replaced with the act of purchasing a non-physical one, an electronic SIM or e-SIM. Combine the idea of an e-SIM with a single baseband chipset that can support both CDMA and GSM networks and you’ve got the seeds to an iPhone that could overthrow the way things are done today.
With an e-SIM there is no need for a physical SIM card, instead an unlocked iPhone 4 user can simply tap on an app that shows all available signals and prices. Choose your carrier, plan, and Apple flashes your e-SIM. Now that’s convenience that Steve Jobs would probably appreciate, and carriers will hate.
Gruber:
What doesn’t make sense is that there are only two GSM carriers in the U.S., AT&T and T-Mobile, and they don’t use the same 3G band. So if you buy one of these to use on T-Mobile you’ll be stuck on EDGE, right?
Yup, you’d be stuck on EDGE if you wanted to use your unlocked iPhone 4 on T-Mobile. If my contract was over, I would purchase an unlocked iPhone 4. The only reason why I’m still with AT&T is because of the ETF.
AT&T’s network is terrible in my area. Crappy signals will cause the iPhone 4 to ratchet up its power and cause faster drainage of the battery. When that happens there’s more RF radiation. For those reasons I have decided to turn off 3G on my iPhone 4 and keep it at 2G (EDGE). And for the same crappy signal I would rather pay much less at T-Mobile.
Of course, this could be moot in the near future if T-Mobile gets swallowed up. T-Mobile offers some nifty packages like a prepaid $100 SIM card that gives you 1000 minutes valid for a full year. For those who don’t talk all that much on the phone but need one in case of emergencies that T-Mobile deal is unbeatable, nothing from AT&T comes close. I want T-Mobile to be independent.
The unlocked GSM iPhone 4 isn’t just another iPhone; it’s a signal to the rest of the cellular industry that things are about change, completely, again.