Lytro Camera – A New Way To Take Photos

Even with the advent of digital camera’s, DSLR’s and other digital camera technologies the idea behind picture taking has always been the same, focus on an image, snap your shot and the shot you take (outside of photoshopping) is what you are left with. The team at Lytro camera were not going to settle with the same old routine so they invented the Lytro “light-field” camera.

The team at Lytro does a great job of simplifying its camera process:

“The Lytro camera lets you capture and share what you see in a whole new way. It’s the first consumer camera that records the entire light field — all the rays of light traveling in every direction through a scene — instead of a flat 2D image. And that changes everything”

Because the entire light field is captured users are able to snap an image and then focus the image after it has been captured. Best of all users can simply tap or click on a certain part of an image to focus that part of the picture. Because focusing occurs once the Lytro image is important to the users computer the possibilities really are endless.

Since the Lytro camera doesn’t need to focus before it takes a picture there is literally zero shutter lag speed. That means you can take a picture immediately without “missing the moment” as the company states.

According to Lytro the camera captures 11 million light rays and uses a micro lens array to a digital image sensor in order to capture full light intensity, color and direction.

Lytro Camera Design

I particularly like the design of the Lytro camera which looks like a lipstick container. The small stature of the device makes it easy to carry around without a ton of necessary baggage. Here’s a quick look at the device:

Notice the indented shutter button at the top of the camera and the display which resides along the backside. The display is also touchscreen friendly which means you can take an image and then focus on various parts of that image right from the backside of the Lytro camera.

The camera also features bright colors including red, blue, purple, green and grey.

Lytro Camera Focus Function Examples

Let’s just pretend for a moment that we took a photo of a dog in focus. Here’s the photo:

Now let’s take a look at the photo when the groundhog is clicked on:

Clicking on other parts of the photo also produce varying focuses which manipulate the photograph, including the ability to zoom in and out on each photo taken.

The Lytro camera is available now for $399 and if the new light-field camera technology is a success we expect low-end, middle-end and even high-end options to be made available in the future. Here’s to hoping this product is not a niche but instead a new way to view how we take photos.

[Images via Lytro]