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Lytro Announces New Light Field Camera

159 points by fumar 12y ago

drcode 12y ago
That is one of the worst product websites I have ever seen... I have an updated version of Chrome and Win8.1 and am either too stupid to figure out how to navigate the site or it simply doesn't work at all. Does anyone else have a diagonal divider that runs away from you if you bring your mouse near it? That said, looks at first glance like an innovative product- If someone can post a link to a website for mere mortals that describes the camera's features I might actually read about what it can do.
- james33 12y ago
  Interesting, the product page looks really great and quite clear to me.
  - drcode 12y ago
    Maybe I'm just an outlier and it works well for other people.
    - brandonbloom 12y ago
      I too was exceedingly confused about the diagonal line. Atrocious design.
    - zimpenfish 12y ago
      It's pretty grim for me in Opera too.
      - nailer 12y ago
        Performance is terrible on Chrome 32 and a 2013 MBA with 8GB RAM.
    - zo1 12y ago
      I didn't have a problem with it until I read your comment. Then I went back and re-tried it. Somehow, I just couldn't quite wrap my head around how to use it... Perhaps it's the act of me trying to "overthink" how to use the UI as opposed to just using it in what comes natural through innocent exploration.
      - bradbatt 12y ago
        The problem is that you have to think at all. It should be inherent and automatic for you to navigate where you want to go as a user. If you have to pause to figure out how to use the UI then the designers have failed.
- philwebster 12y ago
  It's not just you. These kind of un-scrollable sites are awful. The funky diagonal line adds to the confusion.
  - stronglikedan 12y ago
    It looks like HTML5 has opened up the same avenues of UI abuse that Flash did.
  - bradbatt 12y ago
    Web designers need to stop breaking basic browser functionality in their pursuit of creativity.
  - gone35 12y ago
    Yes, yes, yes. I don't know who started this horrible trend but I look forward the time this assault on basic usability gets shelved on the museum of past UX horrors where it belongs. Please give this website to every designer you know: http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
- colinbartlett 12y ago
  I figured it out, but only because I've seen plenty of this horrible style before.
- MBCook 12y ago
  Engadet has a hands-on with the camera: http://www.engadget.com/2014/04/22/lytro-illum/ http://www.engadget.com/2014/04/22/lytro-illum/
- Holbein 12y ago
  Yes, I have to fight with that diagonal divider as well. Here's what I see: When the mouse is not on the screen, you see 2 pages, both with some important infos missing (which is a usability disaster). Only once you move the mouse to one of those two areas, a stuttery animation with z-buffer flickering issues enlarges that area somewhat to show all relevant info. Pages further down in the navigation order look bad, because the diagonal divider cross the navigation list, and some of the background images in mouse-not-on-the-screen state are behind the navigation, and since they have the same brightness level, the navigation is difficult to read. The screen order includes a splash page. This is bad design because the user has no options where to go next. The button icon to proceed is also misleading: it's a round button with a down arrow. Very particular.
  - bradbatt 12y ago
    The main problem is it takes some amount of time to figure out how to navigate. It should just be inherent. The webmaster needs a copy of Steve Krug’s “Don’t Make Me Think” … http://brad.me/1pot03u http://brad.me/1pot03u
- alphakappa 12y ago
  The design is baffling. I couldn't figure out how to navigate the page by scrolling, until I gave up and started clicking the links on the right side. I still have no idea what that diagonal line is for.
  - keehun 12y ago
    I was able to figure it out, but it was still annoying. Equally annoying was that it JS-hotlinked each section of the website requiring me to press the back button a million times to get back to the last actual webpage. Hot-linking is cool, but storing it in the browsing history is not.
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- NegativeK 12y ago
  At best, it's before its time. If I take a photo, I'm not going to distribute the image in a proprietary format to allow refocusing. That leaves using it as a way to fix mistakes -- which, as you become better at photography, become less worth it. Light-field cameras might gain ground in the future, but photographers can be a conservative bunch. The current top of the line professional cameras are astoundingly similar to the film cameras they replaced, and not for lack of manufacturers trying.
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Holbein 12y ago
Additional details: http://www.theverge.com/2014/4/22/5625264/lytro-changed-photography-meet-the-new-illum-camera http://www.theverge.com/2014/4/22/5625264/lytro-changed-phot... http://www.engadget.com/2014/04/22/lytro-illum/ http://www.engadget.com/2014/04/22/lytro-illum/ http://www.dpreview.com/news/2014/04/22/lytro-announces-illum-light-field-camera http://www.dpreview.com/news/2014/04/22/lytro-announces-illu... http://www.dpreview.com/news/2014/04/22/q-a-with-lytro-s-ceo-and-founder-on-the-illum http://www.dpreview.com/news/2014/04/22/q-a-with-lytro-s-ceo... http://petapixel.com/2014/04/22/lytro-unveils-illum-light-field-camera-features-1-inch-sensor-costs-1600/ http://petapixel.com/2014/04/22/lytro-unveils-illum-light-fi...
- vilhelm_s 12y ago
  Thanks! I think this was the most interesting part of the interview: Q: This is a very versatile lens - a bright, constant aperture, lots of zoom, and 13 elements, which is relatively few for a design like this. How are you able to create something like this? A: We designed it in-house and worked with a Japanese partner to build it ... This plays directly into one of the cooler parts of light field, which is this ability to use the additional data that we capture to get breakthrough hardware performances. There’s no lens on the market that’s equivalent to this. The reason is that, in the conventional sense, you would’t be able to deal with the aberration correction you’d need across that long a zoom and that wide an aperture. The typical way you’d deal with aberration correction is with glass elements - traditional optics. Since we capture all of the directional data within the light field, we’re able to do aberration correction in software and computation. It’s the first big example of us trading out physical components of the camera and replacing those with software and computation to give the market something you just couldn’t do conventionally.
  - Holbein 12y ago
    Great find! Interesting indeed.
ajaimk 12y ago
I would appreciate a comparison to their previous camera as to how much better it actually is. There are no actual metrics on that page for me to work with.
hadoukenio 12y ago
The first thought I had when I saw the new Google Camera app was "wow, this might kill that light field camera thing that came out a couple of months ago that I haven't heard of since". I then installed Google Camera, had a play, and it confirmed my thoughts. The new Google Camera app is awesome and it works with my current phone. Extra hardware to carry around = zero. The original Lytro was a cool idea, but I think the slow time-to-market caused it a dragged out death. Google put the last bullet in.
- Tloewald 12y ago
  It's definitely expensive, and it has been slow to iterate. But the nasty-looking fake bokeh produced by Google's app doesn't even make conventional large sensor cameras obsolete. This thing is actually pretty impressive and lets you do stuff you cannot do with any other camera.
  - slantyyz 12y ago
    >> But the nasty-looking fake bokeh produced by Google's app doesn't even make conventional large sensor cameras obsolete. The thing is, the fake bokeh is nasty looking to people who know how to judge bokeh, which is a fairly small portion of camera phone users. To most of them, it's probably good enough for what they are trying to accomplish. And in that regard, while it won't make a conventional large sensor camera obsolete, it'll still have enough people saying "my smartphone can do that, why would I bother buying a big camera that doesn't fit in my pocket?" >> This thing is actually pretty impressive and lets you do stuff you cannot do with any other camera. I agree with this, but I often wonder if the Lytro is a solution looking for a problem.
- MBCook 12y ago
  The difference is that Google's effect is faked in software and relies on the huge depth of field of a tiny sensor. The Lytro actually does what Google is simulating. That's like saying my MP3 player from the early 2000s had a microphone and cost $200, so why would anyone buy thousands of dollars of professional audio equipment anymore to record music?
Tloewald 12y ago
Looks very compelling to me, I love the explorable images -- and adding fast zoom lens and a hotshoe (and 4" touch screen) make it far more useful than the first model. My big issue is resolution -- they talk about a "40 megaray" sensor (which I'll take to be a 40MP sensor with custom microlenses). The question is how many MP does that effectively translate to (e.g. how large an image can I display). I suspect it's significantly shy of 4K, and quite possibly lower than 1080P. Note that the original camera had an 11 "megaray" lens. So that suggests a rough doubling of linear resolution -- good but not great. It seems to me that resolution is an obvious question, and it was a major shortcoming of the original camera (your photos were essentially tiny). Why not address this head-on?
- zokier 12y ago
  From DPreview: resolution is apparently 5 megapixels. So significantly better than 1080p (2mp) but less than 4k (8mp). So the resolution seems to scale fairly linearly with the "ray count".
  - Tloewald 12y ago
    FWIW the old Lytro is 1080x1080 -- https://www.lytro.com/camera/specs/ https://www.lytro.com/camera/specs/ Assuming they move to 4:3 that would be around 1800p. That's pretty darn good, and likely would look perfectly OK slightly upscaled to 4K (assuming that's 1800p and sharp).
CoffeeDregs 12y ago
Another product-in-search-of-a-problem from Lytro. It's entirely likely that I'm wrong, but I assume that there are legions of problems to be solved in the machine vision world which Lytro could help solve. For example, could Lytro: help cars see other cars better; improve surveillance capabilities (yes, yes, surveillance is bad); improve robotics; be useful in medical diagnosis (Lytro for x-rays?). I have a friend at Lytro and asked him these questions and his response was basically "no, no, consumer photography is where it's at!"
- clord 12y ago
  I like that they can use software in the camera to cut glass out of the lens. I have some pretty hefty glass, and if this is executed right (quality wise) it could be a big win -- even if they fix the focus like a traditional camera.
- taeric 12y ago
  Seems unnecessarily harsh. I do think this should help with some things, certainly. Seems this could much more quickly determine distance between some things than a 3d mapping of items would take. I would be curious if there are numbers on this regard. But, I don't know any reason right off to dismiss it. It is not that uncommon for photographs to focus on the wrong item. This basically solves that problem, right?
  - CoffeeDregs 12y ago
    Harsh: agreed; the way I worded that reflected my frustration and was unnecessarily harsh. That said, I am frustrated that what-seems-like-a-great-technology is being used so ineffectively. Lytro was chatting with a car company about using the sensors on their cars and, long time constants aside, that appears to have been for naught. Photography: the camera on my phone has been good-enough for me for years, so I'm a poor judge of camera needs. But I just haven't heard any photo-nerd complain about the problems with focus on a camera, so I am not sure there is an actual problem here that Lytro is solving.
    - 12y ago
frozenport 12y ago
You can't compromise image quality for some gimmick! A conventional lens will let you take an all-in-focus portrait, and we have increasingly seen that digital techniques produce a similar if not better image on cellphones.
lerouxb 12y ago
I don't know how useful this would be for "normal" photography, because choosing the composition, focus, etc is the fun part of the creative process. But I think it can be awesome for macro photography or anything where you're not in full creative control at the time like those automated wildlife critter cams, balloon/kite/drone photography, selfies, webcam shots, mars rovers...
deleted 12y ago
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ISL 12y ago
The angled display and grip is interesting, it hearkens to medium-format viewfinders. For a lot of my photography, I'd be surprised if I'd prefer looking downward rather than at my subject. Congratulations to Lytro - getting this stuff on the market with increasing quality will change the world, perhaps in ways we don't yet expect.
hardwaresofton 12y ago
maybe the design of the website is subpar/a little annoying, but the actual object, the camera is actually beautiful. I think it's very well designed (aesthetically and functionally) -- with any camera, you're going to spend quite a bit of time looking down at the physical thing, tilted downwards in your hand, trying to see if you got a good shot (looking at the preview), I think the design is a pretty bold move towards better practical usability.
- acjohnson55 12y ago
  As cute a solution as that is, I think fold out screen is far more versatile.
  - hardwaresofton 12y ago
    I definitely agree (as functionally, it's indisputable there are more viewing angles on a fold out screen), but some are not fans of fold out screens, and it is one more moving part. Also I didn't mention it before, but I think the whole design has a more natural grip
gdonelli 12y ago
is it just me or the website is slow? I have the latest MacBook Pro...
- gdonelli 12y ago
  the UI I mean, not the bandwidth...
chaostheory 12y ago
I'm surprised that Lytro hasn't commissioned any photographs from any famous photographers to put on exhibit yet at say a MOMA or even something like the California Academy of Arts & Sciences. The reason being that most enthusiasts aren't very excited about bleeding edge technology, as already seen in the comments here. I'm sure the complaints would be worse in a photography forum. Most of them tend to go for tried and true devices. An art commission, possibly with some really large and nice digital photo frames for a gallery, should help mitigate this problem for Lytro and open people's eyes
thenomad 12y ago
Question, since I can't find an answer on Lytro's site: is it possible to use this tech to export 3D models rather than images?
- bergie 12y ago
  I guess you could start from https://github.com/behnam/python-lfp-reader https://github.com/behnam/python-lfp-reader or https://github.com/nrpatel/lfptools/ https://github.com/nrpatel/lfptools/
sscalia 12y ago
God damn, I love companies that make a physical hardware product that is such a gamble like this one. I will be pre-ordering, if only to encourage startups to think bigger than software. Stunning!
- deathanatos 12y ago
  > if only to encourage startups to think bigger than software. Interesting that you say that: > ‘We’re not a camera company’ > Lytro's ultimate, simplest goal is to turn the physical parts of the camera — the lens, the aperture, the shutter — into software. [1]: http://mobile.theverge.com/2014/4/22/5625264/lytro-changed-photography-meet-the-new-illum-camera http://mobile.theverge.com/2014/4/22/5625264/lytro-changed-p...
cschmidt 12y ago
dpreview has an interview with the Lytro CEO: http://www.dpreview.com/news/2014/04/22/q-a-with-lytro-s-ceo-and-founder-on-the-illum http://www.dpreview.com/news/2014/04/22/q-a-with-lytro-s-ceo... It also has an article, which manages to contain the fact they have been skirting around. It says it produces 5MP images. http://www.dpreview.com/news/2014/04/22/lytro-announces-illum-light-field-camera http://www.dpreview.com/news/2014/04/22/lytro-announces-illu...
- solarmist 12y ago
  True, but it produces many different 5MP images. Reading a bit about this it seems unimpressive if you just use it to produce static images; It seems more to deliver on the promise of the holograms you used to be able to buy in stores.
rdl 12y ago
The problem I would have with a camera like this is it breaks my workflow, built around Lightroom, Photoshop, etc. that is probably even more true of real pro photographers. The camera itself is beautiful! It looks like a blackmagic design cinema grown up. I think they would probably do better as a "designed for rental" vs purchased camera, though. It is enough of a novelty that I'd see people using it for a few shoots, but like a tilt shift lens, it is only going to be daily useful to a limited number of people. Especially with limited production, rental would rock --- either direct, or throug something like borrowlenses or lumoid.
- promptphoto 12y ago
  From the Engadget hands-on: Additionally, Lytro has worked out a deal with Adobe and Apple so you can transfer those images to Lightroom, Photoshop or Aperture if you wish to work on them after you've adjusted the image's focus and depth of field to your heart's desire.
  - devindotcom 12y ago
    That's just the app sending a static 5-megapixel jpeg over to another application it sounds like.
antidaily 12y ago
I own an original Lytro. I've used it maybe 3 times. Was completely unimpressed. Shifting focus is just not that cool. Especially when it requires special software and plugins to use it. But its been 3 years or so, so perhaps this version is better.
johlindenbaum 12y ago
Can't wait to see this in action. What a terrible product website.
mortenjorck 12y ago
As a photographer, what I really want to know is what characteristics the light field imager has in terms of things like dynamic range, noise, color reproduction, and so on. If the Illum has a unique sort of "flavor," in the same way that Sigma's Foveon series (with its non-Bayer-patterned sensors) has a certain something that's fun for photographers to experiment with, I could see it catching on. Much more so if there are some weird, light-field-based parameters that you can adjust in a Lightroom-esque app from Lytro. Otherwise, I can't see this thing riding on the appeal of viewer refocusing and tilting – that's just not going to escape the realm of gimmick. Unless the tech offers new creative opportunities to the pro / prosumer photographer, I see that market being less likely to spend $1600 on this than consumers were to spend $400 on the original.
- deltaqueue 12y ago
  As much as I dislike the stereotypical criticism on HN I agree completely. I still don't know what problem Lytro is trying to solve or what benefit it provides, and I've yet to hear about a successful application in the consumer space. Refocusing after a picture has been taken is interesting, but useless unless your camera/phone/whatever doesn't focus properly. Depth of field is just one of many tools used to convey a photograph. For $1500 this camera better blow away other prosumer point-and-shoots like the RX100 Mk II, RX10, Ricoh GR, etc. Given the cost of light-field technology I suspect compromises in sensor sensitivity, dynamic range, and ISO will have to be made.
  - rayiner 12y ago
    > Refocusing after a picture has been taken is interesting, but useless unless your camera/phone/whatever doesn't focus properly. Ever try and take a picture of a kid? My Nexus 5's auto-focus can't keep up with my toddler at all. Getting this technology down into a compact shooter or cell phone sized camera would be a huge leap.
    - yaakov34 12y ago
      You will never get it in a camera the size of a cell-phone camera. This technology relies on the fact that each patch of their lens sees a different image of the subject; it's like stereo, but with a single lens, and many views rather than two. It fundamentally has to have a large-diameter lens.
methehack 12y ago
Did anyone else take one look at this and think "porn!" or am I, alas, the biggest perv in the room...
dgreensp 12y ago
I worked on light fields at MIT and I'm a huge fan of this kind of tech. However, as others have said, the product story is lacking. No one cares about after-the-fact focusing as Lytro has always presented it. A consumer novelty / gimmick won't sell hardware when there are already plenty of smartphone apps that will let you take and share photos in a gimmicky way. If you want everyday consumer use, make a better camera for taking pictures and video of pets and kids. Make the camera that doesn't stop to focus. Make the camera with one button you hold down to open the shutter, and the camera does the rest (you can select the best shot later). You have to be better than a smartphone camera app, which is hard because smartphone photography is getting very, very good. Camcorders and GoPros in the $500-$1000 range are also very, very good. You'd have to be cheaper and more convenient with similar or better quality. If you want professional use, you'll have to talk about the optics and image quality, or at least the artistic qualities of the result. Your software should fit into the pro's pipeline and produce a unique result of lasting value. The hardware can be expensive if necessary to meet this goal. Just my two cents.
- daniel_reetz 12y ago
  Got any links to your work? Very interested in seeing what you've done.
- sp332 12y ago
  I think this is aimed squarely at professional use. All the examples were "you can't do this with your camera". The fact that chromatic aberration can be fixed by the computer means the lens needs only 11 pieces to do 8x zoom from 30-250mm and a 1:3 macro, and weighs only half a pound. In an interview with Engadget, Rosenthal said "We think a new shooting style should naturally evolve... to hold the camera around hip height." http://www.engadget.com/2014/04/22/lytro-illum/ http://www.engadget.com/2014/04/22/lytro-illum/ You can embed an interactive image on a webpage and let people play with the composition of your photo, making a dynamic interactive artwork. Maybe it's not a huge market, but I can imagine a lot of artists being very excited about the potential.
  - Florin_Andrei 12y ago
solarmist 12y ago
I'm surprised no one's mentioned the similarity to the hologram photography. To me this seems like capturing refocus-able hologram with photographic quality. And once the technology progresses enough it will also be able to produce quality stills (this version is fine for smaller prints already) of printable size. All in all it seems like a nice step forward in camera technology that supports and simplifies traditional camera technology (allowing simpler, and cheaper, lens for example) while adding a new way to be creative (Light field effects) and maintaining quality. I don't, however, see it fundamentally changing photography. Just a nice new technology that will pave the way for the next 20 years of camera advances.
phreeza 12y ago
If I understand this tech correctly, wouldn't the reverse. ie applying the same trick to displays, have a huge impact on VR? Then one could focus ones eyes at the actual distance of the object, instead of constantly infinity, and the DOF effects that occur naturally would also be there.
- corysama 12y ago
  You are correct! https://research.nvidia.com/publication/near-eye-light-field-displays https://research.nvidia.com/publication/near-eye-light-field... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deI1IzbveEQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deI1IzbveEQ
yaakov34 12y ago
The light field technology has a lot of interesting applications outside of photography as such. I see a lot of sceptical comments here about the potential of this tech for creative or artistic purposes, and I wanted to comment that it has been the subject of a lot of research in computer vision. Basically, the light field lets you reconstruct a series of images of your subject as seen from every patch of your lens. Of course, for subjects not at infinity, this means multi-view images. This enables (a) 3D reconstruction, by multi-view matching and having precisely known geometry. (b) segmentation, by using 3D reconstruction as mentioned above. (c) Super-resolution, again by multi-view matching, which can let you get back some of the resolution you lost by capturing the image as a "light field" (which means that your sensor can tell which direction the rays hitting it come from - it's done by having an array of lenses in front of the sensor, each covering a patch). Better segmentation of the image enables all sorts of higher computer vision algorithms. Whether this technology is any good as a consumer photography product, I am not the one who can say.
- deeths 12y ago
  Also, focusing (manually or automatically) takes time. Even though it may be just a second, that's enough time to miss a good shot.
  - yaakov34 12y ago
    Well, refocusing is what the marketing and the reviews of this camera focus on (ha, I kill me...), but personally I find the 3D possibilities a lot more interesting. On their not-very-usable website, the refocused shots with most of the image blurry look like gimmicks, while the ones with a 3D effect (they are reconstructing the view from different points on the surface of the lens, letting our point of view move around the scene a little bit) look more promising. I don't know if I would buy the camera just for that as a consumer; to me personally, it would be more interesting in a computer vision product. Returning to the focus, it's true that this has some potential to turn the photographer adage "f/8 and be there" into "f/2 and be there", letting you keep more of the light while the subject is still in focus. However, this is not automatic, since multi-view matching has to be done to superimpose the images of the subject captured from different points of the lens; and this will bring in the difficulties we have with stereo matching, such as occlusions (some parts of the subject can be seen from one point of the lens, but not from another), or ambiguities (it's hard for an algorithm to tell which points of the pictures correspond to the same point of the subject).
davidtrogers 12y ago
It looks like https://pictures.lytro.com/ https://pictures.lytro.com/ got a facelift as well disclaimer: I used to work at Lytro
unicornporn 12y ago
The "old" Lytro had a very small sensor. To be able to experience any control over DOF you had to challenge yourself to create compositions that would include objects of interest both close and far away to be able to even play with "the effect". For my shooting style the technology was totally pointless. Pictures with objects of interest at 1.5 meters up to infinity were sharp all over the place anyway. Perhaps this new thing will bring something new to the scene. But at 5 MP it feels immature. The technology friendly photographers it could attract are usually not so hot on bridge cameras with huge zoom lenses. Perhaps a fixed lens (or 24-50mm equiv) would have been a better choice. I suspect this will be the same. I think the future of focus control might lie in Google's new camera app[1] and phones with dual cameras. Just give them some raw format love (like the 1020 got). [1] http://googleresearch.blogspot.se/2014/04/lens-blur-in-new-google-camera-app.html http://googleresearch.blogspot.se/2014/04/lens-blur-in-new-g...
MMartin1982 12y ago
I'm interested in the technology, but I feel it's lacking a real use case for me. I really like the sample images where you can perspective shift slightly. So what I'd like to see is a two camera/sensor setup to capture a 3D image. I can then take the result, stick my Oculus Rift on and view the result. The perspective shift lets me move my head around a bit. Better yet, stick more sensors on, capture as wide a field of view as possible (closer to 360 the better), and recreate the whole scene in a Rift compatible viewer. You wouldn't have to move around, just have enough of the scene that you can look a bit to the left and right. It would let you feel like you are there to a greater degree. I'd buy something like this for sure.
erikpukinskis 12y ago
This just occurred to me.... There's a fundamental problem with the oculus rift and video content: in order to prevent VR sickness, you need at least enough of a 3d scene to enable head movements within a small volume. Because traditional cameras, including binocular cameras, don't capture a true 3d scene this is impossible. 3d from a camera in the rift will be as bad as the current 3d displays. But the Lytro can capture an actual 3d scene right? So maybe the Lytro is the perfect companion to the oculus rift. The field of view will be limited (like looking through a window) but at least it will be true 3d and could respond correctly to head movements!

159 points by fumar 12y ago

That is one of the worst product websites I have ever seen... I have an updated version of Chrome and Win8.1 and am either too stupid to figure out how to navigate the site or it simply doesn't work at all. Does anyone else have a diagonal divider that runs away from you if you bring your mouse near it? That said, looks at first glance like an innovative product- If someone can post a link to a website for mere mortals that describes the camera's features I might actually read about what it can do.

james33 12y ago
Interesting, the product page looks really great and quite clear to me.
- drcode 12y ago
  Maybe I'm just an outlier and it works well for other people.
  - brandonbloom 12y ago
    I too was exceedingly confused about the diagonal line. Atrocious design.
  - zimpenfish 12y ago
    It's pretty grim for me in Opera too.
    - nailer 12y ago
      Performance is terrible on Chrome 32 and a 2013 MBA with 8GB RAM.
  - zo1 12y ago
    I didn't have a problem with it until I read your comment. Then I went back and re-tried it. Somehow, I just couldn't quite wrap my head around how to use it... Perhaps it's the act of me trying to "overthink" how to use the UI as opposed to just using it in what comes natural through innocent exploration.
    - bradbatt 12y ago
      The problem is that you have to think at all. It should be inherent and automatic for you to navigate where you want to go as a user. If you have to pause to figure out how to use the UI then the designers have failed.
philwebster 12y ago
It's not just you. These kind of un-scrollable sites are awful. The funky diagonal line adds to the confusion.
- stronglikedan 12y ago
  It looks like HTML5 has opened up the same avenues of UI abuse that Flash did.
- bradbatt 12y ago
  Web designers need to stop breaking basic browser functionality in their pursuit of creativity.
- gone35 12y ago
  Yes, yes, yes. I don't know who started this horrible trend but I look forward the time this assault on basic usability gets shelved on the museum of past UX horrors where it belongs. Please give this website to every designer you know: http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
colinbartlett 12y ago
I figured it out, but only because I've seen plenty of this horrible style before.
MBCook 12y ago
Engadet has a hands-on with the camera: http://www.engadget.com/2014/04/22/lytro-illum/ http://www.engadget.com/2014/04/22/lytro-illum/
Holbein 12y ago
Yes, I have to fight with that diagonal divider as well. Here's what I see: When the mouse is not on the screen, you see 2 pages, both with some important infos missing (which is a usability disaster). Only once you move the mouse to one of those two areas, a stuttery animation with z-buffer flickering issues enlarges that area somewhat to show all relevant info. Pages further down in the navigation order look bad, because the diagonal divider cross the navigation list, and some of the background images in mouse-not-on-the-screen state are behind the navigation, and since they have the same brightness level, the navigation is difficult to read. The screen order includes a splash page. This is bad design because the user has no options where to go next. The button icon to proceed is also misleading: it's a round button with a down arrow. Very particular.
- bradbatt 12y ago
  The main problem is it takes some amount of time to figure out how to navigate. It should just be inherent. The webmaster needs a copy of Steve Krug’s “Don’t Make Me Think” … http://brad.me/1pot03u http://brad.me/1pot03u
alphakappa 12y ago
The design is baffling. I couldn't figure out how to navigate the page by scrolling, until I gave up and started clicking the links on the right side. I still have no idea what that diagonal line is for.
- keehun 12y ago
  I was able to figure it out, but it was still annoying. Equally annoying was that it JS-hotlinked each section of the website requiring me to press the back button a million times to get back to the last actual webpage. Hot-linking is cool, but storing it in the browsing history is not.

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NegativeK 12y ago
At best, it's before its time. If I take a photo, I'm not going to distribute the image in a proprietary format to allow refocusing. That leaves using it as a way to fix mistakes -- which, as you become better at photography, become less worth it. Light-field cameras might gain ground in the future, but photographers can be a conservative bunch. The current top of the line professional cameras are astoundingly similar to the film cameras they replaced, and not for lack of manufacturers trying.

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Holbein 12y ago

Additional details: http://www.theverge.com/2014/4/22/5625264/lytro-changed-photography-meet-the-new-illum-camera http://www.theverge.com/2014/4/22/5625264/lytro-changed-phot... http://www.engadget.com/2014/04/22/lytro-illum/ http://www.engadget.com/2014/04/22/lytro-illum/ http://www.dpreview.com/news/2014/04/22/lytro-announces-illum-light-field-camera http://www.dpreview.com/news/2014/04/22/lytro-announces-illu... http://www.dpreview.com/news/2014/04/22/q-a-with-lytro-s-ceo-and-founder-on-the-illum http://www.dpreview.com/news/2014/04/22/q-a-with-lytro-s-ceo... http://petapixel.com/2014/04/22/lytro-unveils-illum-light-field-camera-features-1-inch-sensor-costs-1600/ http://petapixel.com/2014/04/22/lytro-unveils-illum-light-fi...

vilhelm_s 12y ago
Thanks! I think this was the most interesting part of the interview: Q: This is a very versatile lens - a bright, constant aperture, lots of zoom, and 13 elements, which is relatively few for a design like this. How are you able to create something like this? A: We designed it in-house and worked with a Japanese partner to build it ... This plays directly into one of the cooler parts of light field, which is this ability to use the additional data that we capture to get breakthrough hardware performances. There’s no lens on the market that’s equivalent to this. The reason is that, in the conventional sense, you would’t be able to deal with the aberration correction you’d need across that long a zoom and that wide an aperture. The typical way you’d deal with aberration correction is with glass elements - traditional optics. Since we capture all of the directional data within the light field, we’re able to do aberration correction in software and computation. It’s the first big example of us trading out physical components of the camera and replacing those with software and computation to give the market something you just couldn’t do conventionally.
- Holbein 12y ago
  Great find! Interesting indeed.

ajaimk 12y ago

I would appreciate a comparison to their previous camera as to how much better it actually is. There are no actual metrics on that page for me to work with.

hadoukenio 12y ago

The first thought I had when I saw the new Google Camera app was "wow, this might kill that light field camera thing that came out a couple of months ago that I haven't heard of since". I then installed Google Camera, had a play, and it confirmed my thoughts. The new Google Camera app is awesome and it works with my current phone. Extra hardware to carry around = zero. The original Lytro was a cool idea, but I think the slow time-to-market caused it a dragged out death. Google put the last bullet in.

Tloewald 12y ago
It's definitely expensive, and it has been slow to iterate. But the nasty-looking fake bokeh produced by Google's app doesn't even make conventional large sensor cameras obsolete. This thing is actually pretty impressive and lets you do stuff you cannot do with any other camera.
- slantyyz 12y ago
  >> But the nasty-looking fake bokeh produced by Google's app doesn't even make conventional large sensor cameras obsolete. The thing is, the fake bokeh is nasty looking to people who know how to judge bokeh, which is a fairly small portion of camera phone users. To most of them, it's probably good enough for what they are trying to accomplish. And in that regard, while it won't make a conventional large sensor camera obsolete, it'll still have enough people saying "my smartphone can do that, why would I bother buying a big camera that doesn't fit in my pocket?" >> This thing is actually pretty impressive and lets you do stuff you cannot do with any other camera. I agree with this, but I often wonder if the Lytro is a solution looking for a problem.
MBCook 12y ago
The difference is that Google's effect is faked in software and relies on the huge depth of field of a tiny sensor. The Lytro actually does what Google is simulating. That's like saying my MP3 player from the early 2000s had a microphone and cost $200, so why would anyone buy thousands of dollars of professional audio equipment anymore to record music?

Tloewald 12y ago

Looks very compelling to me, I love the explorable images -- and adding fast zoom lens and a hotshoe (and 4" touch screen) make it far more useful than the first model. My big issue is resolution -- they talk about a "40 megaray" sensor (which I'll take to be a 40MP sensor with custom microlenses). The question is how many MP does that effectively translate to (e.g. how large an image can I display). I suspect it's significantly shy of 4K, and quite possibly lower than 1080P. Note that the original camera had an 11 "megaray" lens. So that suggests a rough doubling of linear resolution -- good but not great. It seems to me that resolution is an obvious question, and it was a major shortcoming of the original camera (your photos were essentially tiny). Why not address this head-on?

zokier 12y ago
From DPreview: resolution is apparently 5 megapixels. So significantly better than 1080p (2mp) but less than 4k (8mp). So the resolution seems to scale fairly linearly with the "ray count".
- Tloewald 12y ago
  FWIW the old Lytro is 1080x1080 -- https://www.lytro.com/camera/specs/ https://www.lytro.com/camera/specs/ Assuming they move to 4:3 that would be around 1800p. That's pretty darn good, and likely would look perfectly OK slightly upscaled to 4K (assuming that's 1800p and sharp).

CoffeeDregs 12y ago

Another product-in-search-of-a-problem from Lytro. It's entirely likely that I'm wrong, but I assume that there are legions of problems to be solved in the machine vision world which Lytro could help solve. For example, could Lytro: help cars see other cars better; improve surveillance capabilities (yes, yes, surveillance is bad); improve robotics; be useful in medical diagnosis (Lytro for x-rays?). I have a friend at Lytro and asked him these questions and his response was basically "no, no, consumer photography is where it's at!"

clord 12y ago
I like that they can use software in the camera to cut glass out of the lens. I have some pretty hefty glass, and if this is executed right (quality wise) it could be a big win -- even if they fix the focus like a traditional camera.
taeric 12y ago
Seems unnecessarily harsh. I do think this should help with some things, certainly. Seems this could much more quickly determine distance between some things than a 3d mapping of items would take. I would be curious if there are numbers on this regard. But, I don't know any reason right off to dismiss it. It is not that uncommon for photographs to focus on the wrong item. This basically solves that problem, right?
- CoffeeDregs 12y ago
  Harsh: agreed; the way I worded that reflected my frustration and was unnecessarily harsh. That said, I am frustrated that what-seems-like-a-great-technology is being used so ineffectively. Lytro was chatting with a car company about using the sensors on their cars and, long time constants aside, that appears to have been for naught. Photography: the camera on my phone has been good-enough for me for years, so I'm a poor judge of camera needs. But I just haven't heard any photo-nerd complain about the problems with focus on a camera, so I am not sure there is an actual problem here that Lytro is solving.
  - 12y ago

frozenport 12y ago

You can't compromise image quality for some gimmick! A conventional lens will let you take an all-in-focus portrait, and we have increasingly seen that digital techniques produce a similar if not better image on cellphones.

lerouxb 12y ago

I don't know how useful this would be for "normal" photography, because choosing the composition, focus, etc is the fun part of the creative process. But I think it can be awesome for macro photography or anything where you're not in full creative control at the time like those automated wildlife critter cams, balloon/kite/drone photography, selfies, webcam shots, mars rovers...

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ISL 12y ago

The angled display and grip is interesting, it hearkens to medium-format viewfinders. For a lot of my photography, I'd be surprised if I'd prefer looking downward rather than at my subject. Congratulations to Lytro - getting this stuff on the market with increasing quality will change the world, perhaps in ways we don't yet expect.

hardwaresofton 12y ago

maybe the design of the website is subpar/a little annoying, but the actual object, the camera is actually beautiful. I think it's very well designed (aesthetically and functionally) -- with any camera, you're going to spend quite a bit of time looking down at the physical thing, tilted downwards in your hand, trying to see if you got a good shot (looking at the preview), I think the design is a pretty bold move towards better practical usability.

acjohnson55 12y ago
As cute a solution as that is, I think fold out screen is far more versatile.
- hardwaresofton 12y ago
  I definitely agree (as functionally, it's indisputable there are more viewing angles on a fold out screen), but some are not fans of fold out screens, and it is one more moving part. Also I didn't mention it before, but I think the whole design has a more natural grip

gdonelli 12y ago

is it just me or the website is slow? I have the latest MacBook Pro...

gdonelli 12y ago
the UI I mean, not the bandwidth...

chaostheory 12y ago

I'm surprised that Lytro hasn't commissioned any photographs from any famous photographers to put on exhibit yet at say a MOMA or even something like the California Academy of Arts & Sciences. The reason being that most enthusiasts aren't very excited about bleeding edge technology, as already seen in the comments here. I'm sure the complaints would be worse in a photography forum. Most of them tend to go for tried and true devices. An art commission, possibly with some really large and nice digital photo frames for a gallery, should help mitigate this problem for Lytro and open people's eyes

thenomad 12y ago

Question, since I can't find an answer on Lytro's site: is it possible to use this tech to export 3D models rather than images?

bergie 12y ago
I guess you could start from https://github.com/behnam/python-lfp-reader https://github.com/behnam/python-lfp-reader or https://github.com/nrpatel/lfptools/ https://github.com/nrpatel/lfptools/

sscalia 12y ago

God damn, I love companies that make a physical hardware product that is such a gamble like this one. I will be pre-ordering, if only to encourage startups to think bigger than software. Stunning!

deathanatos 12y ago
> if only to encourage startups to think bigger than software. Interesting that you say that: > ‘We’re not a camera company’ > Lytro's ultimate, simplest goal is to turn the physical parts of the camera — the lens, the aperture, the shutter — into software. [1]: http://mobile.theverge.com/2014/4/22/5625264/lytro-changed-photography-meet-the-new-illum-camera http://mobile.theverge.com/2014/4/22/5625264/lytro-changed-p...

cschmidt 12y ago

dpreview has an interview with the Lytro CEO: http://www.dpreview.com/news/2014/04/22/q-a-with-lytro-s-ceo-and-founder-on-the-illum http://www.dpreview.com/news/2014/04/22/q-a-with-lytro-s-ceo... It also has an article, which manages to contain the fact they have been skirting around. It says it produces 5MP images. http://www.dpreview.com/news/2014/04/22/lytro-announces-illum-light-field-camera http://www.dpreview.com/news/2014/04/22/lytro-announces-illu...

solarmist 12y ago
True, but it produces many different 5MP images. Reading a bit about this it seems unimpressive if you just use it to produce static images; It seems more to deliver on the promise of the holograms you used to be able to buy in stores.

rdl 12y ago

The problem I would have with a camera like this is it breaks my workflow, built around Lightroom, Photoshop, etc. that is probably even more true of real pro photographers. The camera itself is beautiful! It looks like a blackmagic design cinema grown up. I think they would probably do better as a "designed for rental" vs purchased camera, though. It is enough of a novelty that I'd see people using it for a few shoots, but like a tilt shift lens, it is only going to be daily useful to a limited number of people. Especially with limited production, rental would rock --- either direct, or throug something like borrowlenses or lumoid.

promptphoto 12y ago
From the Engadget hands-on: Additionally, Lytro has worked out a deal with Adobe and Apple so you can transfer those images to Lightroom, Photoshop or Aperture if you wish to work on them after you've adjusted the image's focus and depth of field to your heart's desire.
- devindotcom 12y ago
  That's just the app sending a static 5-megapixel jpeg over to another application it sounds like.

antidaily 12y ago

I own an original Lytro. I've used it maybe 3 times. Was completely unimpressed. Shifting focus is just not that cool. Especially when it requires special software and plugins to use it. But its been 3 years or so, so perhaps this version is better.

johlindenbaum 12y ago

Can't wait to see this in action. What a terrible product website.

mortenjorck 12y ago

As a photographer, what I really want to know is what characteristics the light field imager has in terms of things like dynamic range, noise, color reproduction, and so on. If the Illum has a unique sort of "flavor," in the same way that Sigma's Foveon series (with its non-Bayer-patterned sensors) has a certain something that's fun for photographers to experiment with, I could see it catching on. Much more so if there are some weird, light-field-based parameters that you can adjust in a Lightroom-esque app from Lytro. Otherwise, I can't see this thing riding on the appeal of viewer refocusing and tilting – that's just not going to escape the realm of gimmick. Unless the tech offers new creative opportunities to the pro / prosumer photographer, I see that market being less likely to spend $1600 on this than consumers were to spend $400 on the original.

deltaqueue 12y ago
As much as I dislike the stereotypical criticism on HN I agree completely. I still don't know what problem Lytro is trying to solve or what benefit it provides, and I've yet to hear about a successful application in the consumer space. Refocusing after a picture has been taken is interesting, but useless unless your camera/phone/whatever doesn't focus properly. Depth of field is just one of many tools used to convey a photograph. For $1500 this camera better blow away other prosumer point-and-shoots like the RX100 Mk II, RX10, Ricoh GR, etc. Given the cost of light-field technology I suspect compromises in sensor sensitivity, dynamic range, and ISO will have to be made.
- rayiner 12y ago
  > Refocusing after a picture has been taken is interesting, but useless unless your camera/phone/whatever doesn't focus properly. Ever try and take a picture of a kid? My Nexus 5's auto-focus can't keep up with my toddler at all. Getting this technology down into a compact shooter or cell phone sized camera would be a huge leap.
  - yaakov34 12y ago
    You will never get it in a camera the size of a cell-phone camera. This technology relies on the fact that each patch of their lens sees a different image of the subject; it's like stereo, but with a single lens, and many views rather than two. It fundamentally has to have a large-diameter lens.

methehack 12y ago

Did anyone else take one look at this and think "porn!" or am I, alas, the biggest perv in the room...

dgreensp 12y ago

I worked on light fields at MIT and I'm a huge fan of this kind of tech. However, as others have said, the product story is lacking. No one cares about after-the-fact focusing as Lytro has always presented it. A consumer novelty / gimmick won't sell hardware when there are already plenty of smartphone apps that will let you take and share photos in a gimmicky way. If you want everyday consumer use, make a better camera for taking pictures and video of pets and kids. Make the camera that doesn't stop to focus. Make the camera with one button you hold down to open the shutter, and the camera does the rest (you can select the best shot later). You have to be better than a smartphone camera app, which is hard because smartphone photography is getting very, very good. Camcorders and GoPros in the $500-$1000 range are also very, very good. You'd have to be cheaper and more convenient with similar or better quality. If you want professional use, you'll have to talk about the optics and image quality, or at least the artistic qualities of the result. Your software should fit into the pro's pipeline and produce a unique result of lasting value. The hardware can be expensive if necessary to meet this goal. Just my two cents.

daniel_reetz 12y ago
Got any links to your work? Very interested in seeing what you've done.
sp332 12y ago
I think this is aimed squarely at professional use. All the examples were "you can't do this with your camera". The fact that chromatic aberration can be fixed by the computer means the lens needs only 11 pieces to do 8x zoom from 30-250mm and a 1:3 macro, and weighs only half a pound. In an interview with Engadget, Rosenthal said "We think a new shooting style should naturally evolve... to hold the camera around hip height." http://www.engadget.com/2014/04/22/lytro-illum/ http://www.engadget.com/2014/04/22/lytro-illum/ You can embed an interactive image on a webpage and let people play with the composition of your photo, making a dynamic interactive artwork. Maybe it's not a huge market, but I can imagine a lot of artists being very excited about the potential.
- Florin_Andrei 12y ago

solarmist 12y ago

I'm surprised no one's mentioned the similarity to the hologram photography. To me this seems like capturing refocus-able hologram with photographic quality. And once the technology progresses enough it will also be able to produce quality stills (this version is fine for smaller prints already) of printable size. All in all it seems like a nice step forward in camera technology that supports and simplifies traditional camera technology (allowing simpler, and cheaper, lens for example) while adding a new way to be creative (Light field effects) and maintaining quality. I don't, however, see it fundamentally changing photography. Just a nice new technology that will pave the way for the next 20 years of camera advances.

phreeza 12y ago

If I understand this tech correctly, wouldn't the reverse. ie applying the same trick to displays, have a huge impact on VR? Then one could focus ones eyes at the actual distance of the object, instead of constantly infinity, and the DOF effects that occur naturally would also be there.

corysama 12y ago
You are correct! https://research.nvidia.com/publication/near-eye-light-field-displays https://research.nvidia.com/publication/near-eye-light-field... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deI1IzbveEQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deI1IzbveEQ

yaakov34 12y ago

The light field technology has a lot of interesting applications outside of photography as such. I see a lot of sceptical comments here about the potential of this tech for creative or artistic purposes, and I wanted to comment that it has been the subject of a lot of research in computer vision. Basically, the light field lets you reconstruct a series of images of your subject as seen from every patch of your lens. Of course, for subjects not at infinity, this means multi-view images. This enables (a) 3D reconstruction, by multi-view matching and having precisely known geometry. (b) segmentation, by using 3D reconstruction as mentioned above. (c) Super-resolution, again by multi-view matching, which can let you get back some of the resolution you lost by capturing the image as a "light field" (which means that your sensor can tell which direction the rays hitting it come from - it's done by having an array of lenses in front of the sensor, each covering a patch). Better segmentation of the image enables all sorts of higher computer vision algorithms. Whether this technology is any good as a consumer photography product, I am not the one who can say.

deeths 12y ago
Also, focusing (manually or automatically) takes time. Even though it may be just a second, that's enough time to miss a good shot.
- yaakov34 12y ago
  Well, refocusing is what the marketing and the reviews of this camera focus on (ha, I kill me...), but personally I find the 3D possibilities a lot more interesting. On their not-very-usable website, the refocused shots with most of the image blurry look like gimmicks, while the ones with a 3D effect (they are reconstructing the view from different points on the surface of the lens, letting our point of view move around the scene a little bit) look more promising. I don't know if I would buy the camera just for that as a consumer; to me personally, it would be more interesting in a computer vision product. Returning to the focus, it's true that this has some potential to turn the photographer adage "f/8 and be there" into "f/2 and be there", letting you keep more of the light while the subject is still in focus. However, this is not automatic, since multi-view matching has to be done to superimpose the images of the subject captured from different points of the lens; and this will bring in the difficulties we have with stereo matching, such as occlusions (some parts of the subject can be seen from one point of the lens, but not from another), or ambiguities (it's hard for an algorithm to tell which points of the pictures correspond to the same point of the subject).

davidtrogers 12y ago

It looks like https://pictures.lytro.com/ https://pictures.lytro.com/ got a facelift as well disclaimer: I used to work at Lytro

unicornporn 12y ago

The "old" Lytro had a very small sensor. To be able to experience any control over DOF you had to challenge yourself to create compositions that would include objects of interest both close and far away to be able to even play with "the effect". For my shooting style the technology was totally pointless. Pictures with objects of interest at 1.5 meters up to infinity were sharp all over the place anyway. Perhaps this new thing will bring something new to the scene. But at 5 MP it feels immature. The technology friendly photographers it could attract are usually not so hot on bridge cameras with huge zoom lenses. Perhaps a fixed lens (or 24-50mm equiv) would have been a better choice. I suspect this will be the same. I think the future of focus control might lie in Google's new camera app[1] and phones with dual cameras. Just give them some raw format love (like the 1020 got). [1] http://googleresearch.blogspot.se/2014/04/lens-blur-in-new-google-camera-app.html http://googleresearch.blogspot.se/2014/04/lens-blur-in-new-g...

MMartin1982 12y ago

I'm interested in the technology, but I feel it's lacking a real use case for me. I really like the sample images where you can perspective shift slightly. So what I'd like to see is a two camera/sensor setup to capture a 3D image. I can then take the result, stick my Oculus Rift on and view the result. The perspective shift lets me move my head around a bit. Better yet, stick more sensors on, capture as wide a field of view as possible (closer to 360 the better), and recreate the whole scene in a Rift compatible viewer. You wouldn't have to move around, just have enough of the scene that you can look a bit to the left and right. It would let you feel like you are there to a greater degree. I'd buy something like this for sure.

erikpukinskis 12y ago

This just occurred to me.... There's a fundamental problem with the oculus rift and video content: in order to prevent VR sickness, you need at least enough of a 3d scene to enable head movements within a small volume. Because traditional cameras, including binocular cameras, don't capture a true 3d scene this is impossible. 3d from a camera in the rift will be as bad as the current 3d displays. But the Lytro can capture an actual 3d scene right? So maybe the Lytro is the perfect companion to the oculus rift. The field of view will be limited (like looking through a window) but at least it will be true 3d and could respond correctly to head movements!