Details of the Computational Camera “Lytro” are finally emerging, and it’s combining an Apple sense of minimalistic style with some high-end photo processing features, all into one tiny sleek package. Engadget was lucky with the first hands-on:
Right off the bat, you’ll notice its diminutive size. If we’re frank, we were expecting something more akin to a DSLR — visions no doubt conjured by the immense arrays used to do this sort of wizardry back in the day. Its small, beautifully made, anodized aluminum body reminds us of a cross between an iPod Nano and an iSight camera — inspiration that isn’t only skin deep, as Lytro’s desktop software (which you’ll need to open and export .lfp files) is currently Mac only, with a Windows version in development.
I must admit, I’m also surprised by the form factor but it truly is beautiful. Given how much can be done after the moment with this camera, it kinda makes sense that it would have almost no on-device controls. Also, they’ve created a neat flash/javascript based viewer that you can play with on their website, letting you export the raw LFP files to sites like twitter and facebook so that viewers can adjust the focus on their own.
Hopefully they’re working with groups like Adobe to create Photoshop importers for their format, so that eventually we can do some even more amazing things like photos with multiple focal depths (put the foreground and background in focus at the same time) or pseudo-HDR.
via Lytro.
