Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Lytro: Picture Revolution

It it not often that a technology comes along that has huge impact to the industry and to consumers - what we call as "the best thing since sliced bread."

Before sliced bread there was the invention of the wheel. Then some notable disruptive technologies after sliced bread are pasteurization, the internet, iPhone/iPad and now... Lytro.

What's so special about Lytro? It completely changes how we do photography since the word photography was coined and the camera device was invented. Up to now what we do to take a picture is point on the selected subject, focus manually or automatically, then press a button to capture the image. Lytro makes the focusing step obsolete during picture taking. You just shoot without care using a Lytro camera. What's great about it is that all images taken looks like it was taken by an SLR camera with a shallow depth of field (DOF) lens. When you view the image at home, you can select which part of the photo is focused and its background and foreground automatically becomes blurred. Then click again on another part of the photo then the image will re-focus automatically. No need for editing in PhotoShop or Picasa to get that blur effect. This is what I call "a true point and shoot camera" unlike today's camera that are actually "point and focus and shoot camera."

Shown below is a single shot taken with a Lytro camera veiwed depending on what part of the image you want to be in focus. Clicking on the tip of the spear results to the image on the left while clicking on the person produces the image on the right. No editing needed - the picture is fully interactive - just click any part of the image then the focus immediately changes to it.

Lytro

Go to their website and browse the picture gallery. Each photo you find there are interactive Lytro images. Just click on an area of a photo and observe with mouth open what happens. I bet even Steve Jobs himself will call this "magical."

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