Shoot Now, Focus Later

by Harris Cohen, The PromoGuru

Thought you had the perfect shot on your vacation, but then it ended up a blurry mess? With an advanced new camera coming out later this year, you won’t have to worry. Just fix it later!

Silicon Valley start-up Lytro is set to introduce a point-and-shoot style camera which will feature technology that lets a picture’s focus be adjusted after it is taken. Once you have transferred the file to your computer, you will be able to bring any out-of-focus object in the picture into sharp relief.

 Is this the next big thing in digital photography? Could Lytro become as essential as Photoshop to the photographers of the near future?

Computer scientists and early prototype users alike have been heaping praise on the Mountain View, CA-based company. “[…] It’s rare that someone comes along with something that is this much of a breakthrough,” Ben Horowitz, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, a major investor in Lytro, told The New York Times. “It’s super-exciting.”

The heart of Lytro’s breakthrough technology is a mircolens array, a special sensor which acts as many lenses within a tiny space. This array captures great amounts of light data from several angles. Once run through their sophisticated software, the viewer is able to switch points of focus. The software will be easily accessible – there will even be a Facebook app.

Some photographers may worry that these amazing new features may lead to loss of resolution. But photojournalist Richard Koci Hernandez, an early tester of the Lytro camera, said the picture resolution was indistinguishable from that of other point-and-shoot cameras, like Canon or Nikon.

Another great feature of the camera is that there is no shutter lag, which happens in most digital cameras when waiting for the autofocus to function. While most of today’s cameras may have the lag down to just fractions of a second, that could be just long enough for a pose to be dropped or a child to dart off out of frame.

Pictures taken with the Lytro camera will also be able to be viewed as 3-D images on a computer screen, when seen through 3-D glasses.

It seems like a camera that could do all this, even if it’s a point-and-shoot, should be far out of the price range of a normal consumer. But Lytros maintains it will be marketed to the general public and sold through online retailers, including Amazon.

However, the competition is not far beyond. Adobe is said to be developing a similar technology to let you choose which part of the photo should be in focus.

In the meantime, you can play around with Lytro’s focusing software at their website: http://www.lytro.com/picture_gallery