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Revolutionary "Light Field" camera tech - shoot-first, focus-later

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Re: Revolutionary "Light Field" camera tech - shoot-first, focus-later

#31

Post by sbierwagen »

jws wrote: post #26
sbierwagen wrote: post #17

The downsides, which, of course, this press release doesn't mention: - Greatly, greatly reduced image resolution. Great big dedicated-camera sized lens and image sensor, cellphone-camera sized pictures. 1680×1050, at most. (1.76MP) - Color aberration. The microlenses have to be small, of course, so they're going to be made of single physical elements, rather than doublets.[1] - Various amusing aliasing problems. (not…

Proprietary toolchain for the dynamic images – you could embed the full dynamic information in a JPEG extension and use the JPEG thumbnail as a thumbnail and the JPEG image as your selected representation. Then you could use your nonstandard code to regenerate the JPEG image data from your full data when you wished. You can just produce a composite image that's sharp all over… – but what fun is that? I'm having a gra…

It's a piece of first-generation consumer electronics, made in small production runs by a new company that's already spent $30 million in R&D. While each camera will not cost much, they will be priced high.

Re: Revolutionary "Light Field" camera tech - shoot-first, focus-later

#32

Post by schwabacher »

One awesome use for this technology is in microscopes! Instead of having to focus on each slide, slides can be run through much faster, photographed once, and interesting objects (like cells in a culture) can be found by processing afterwards.

And even cooler IMO, is that a display panel with proportionately sized microlenses can be used (after a little image processing) to recreate the light field for a glasses free 3d display.

Re: Revolutionary "Light Field" camera tech - shoot-first, focus-later

#33

Post by shadowfox »

DLarsen wrote: post #30

As a geek, I think this is totally awesome. As a casual photographer, I'm less excited. I've pretty much got the hang of focusing my shots as I'm taking them. Why focus later what I can focus now?

Well. One use would be to experiment with different focuses and pick the best later. It is not a rarity for me to look at old pictures and think that a different focus would have worked better (Then again I am no great photographer. For all I know others are never feel this need. So take that with a pinch of salt)

Re: Revolutionary "Light Field" camera tech - shoot-first, focus-later

#34

Post by thomasgerbe »

DLarsen wrote: post #30

As a geek, I think this is totally awesome. As a casual photographer, I'm less excited. I've pretty much got the hang of focusing my shots as I'm taking them. Why focus later what I can focus now?

I'm a casual photographer too.

The advantage I see in the future is that you are 'guaranteed' a potentially sharp picture.

Even when I do portraits with a wide aperture (1.2/1.4) there are times when I miss the focus on a tiny detail that I wish was more in focus. And since I prefer doing candid poses, redoing a situation just isn't that preferable.

For sports or wildlife, I imagine it can be hard to focus too, sometimes just missing a shot of a bird because of a split second.

It does make me wonder how the motion blur on this would work.

Re: Revolutionary "Light Field" camera tech - shoot-first, focus-later

#35

Post by ricardobeat »

I remember seeing this "news" years ago...

edit: here's the article from 2005 http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/lfcamera/

The company that flourished from this research in 2008: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/refocus-imaging

And another startup already doing this for mobile phones: http://dvice.com/archives/2011/02/pelican-imaging.php

Re: Revolutionary "Light Field" camera tech - shoot-first, focus-later

#36

Post by wisty »

adelevie wrote: post #19
sbierwagen wrote: post #17

The downsides, which, of course, this press release doesn't mention: - Greatly, greatly reduced image resolution. Great big dedicated-camera sized lens and image sensor, cellphone-camera sized pictures. 1680×1050, at most. (1.76MP) - Color aberration. The microlenses have to be small, of course, so they're going to be made of single physical elements, rather than doublets.[1] - Various amusing aliasing problems. (not…

>cellphone-camera sized pictures. With 5+ megapixel cell phone cameras being common these days, what resolution do you imply in that sentence?

Most cell phones have about 1 MP of signal, and 4 MP of noise.

Re: Revolutionary "Light Field" camera tech - shoot-first, focus-later

#37

Post by cheez »

sbierwagen wrote: post #17

The downsides, which, of course, this press release doesn't mention: - Greatly, greatly reduced image resolution. Great big dedicated-camera sized lens and image sensor, cellphone-camera sized pictures. 1680×1050, at most. (1.76MP) - Color aberration. The microlenses have to be small, of course, so they're going to be made of single physical elements, rather than doublets.[1] - Various amusing aliasing problems. (not…

It's the first version man. This is exciting technology. I love seeing true innovation like this come to life.

I'm gonna be all over this. You know, for the kids.

Re: Revolutionary "Light Field" camera tech - shoot-first, focus-later

#38

Post by whatusername »

clc wrote: post #18

This is a very interesting concept, I would be doubly interested to see this technology used for video in camcorders. However, I'm curious to see if they have the resources available to go toe to toe with Nikon, Canon, and Olympus. The camera industry is so competitive... and the life cycles on digital cameras are so quick nowadays. They may find it difficult to keep up.

semi-pro's. Don't forget about Medium Format, etc: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium_format_%28film%29#Digita...

Re: Revolutionary "Light Field" camera tech - shoot-first, focus-later

#39

Post by wisty »

ggchappell wrote: post #2

Very nice. But it leaves me wondering about a couple of things: (1) Given the info captured by the camera, can we, without further human input, create an image in which everything is in focus? (2) What the heck are these people thinking? Going into the camera business? That means that, in order to get my hands on this technology, I am stuck with whatever zillions of other design decisions they made. One product. No c…

(1) - cameras already do this. Photography 101 - if you use a small apature, everything is in focus (minus diffraction and motion blur). Cheap lenses (like most cellphones) have low apertures, and don't really need to focus. Expensive lenses (like the iPhone 4 lens) often have high apertures, which let you take faster photos, and artistically blur stuff.

Photographers don't like to do this, as blurring the background draws your attention to the subject.

Re: Revolutionary "Light Field" camera tech - shoot-first, focus-later

#40

Post by bad_user »

jws wrote: post #26
sbierwagen wrote: post #17

The downsides, which, of course, this press release doesn't mention: - Greatly, greatly reduced image resolution. Great big dedicated-camera sized lens and image sensor, cellphone-camera sized pictures. 1680×1050, at most. (1.76MP) - Color aberration. The microlenses have to be small, of course, so they're going to be made of single physical elements, rather than doublets.[1] - Various amusing aliasing problems. (not…

Proprietary toolchain for the dynamic images – you could embed the full dynamic information in a JPEG extension and use the JPEG thumbnail as a thumbnail and the JPEG image as your selected representation. Then you could use your nonstandard code to regenerate the JPEG image data from your full data when you wished. You can just produce a composite image that's sharp all over… – but what fun is that? I'm having a gra…

     You can just produce a composite image that's sharp 
     all over… – but what fun is that?
With DSLRs that have huge lenses with large aperture sizes, the depth of field varies a lot and those lenses also have a sweetspot in focal-length / aperture for which images produced are the sharpest. Lowering the aperture size increases the depth of field, but then you've got another problem as the shutter speed also has to be adjusted and you end up using a tripod.

Getting a picture that has everything in focus and is tack sharp can be seriously challenging.

To tell you the truth, while these photos with adjustable focus seem cool, focus is not my pain - what I want is to be able to take great photos (the kind that 35mm cameras can do) for reasonable prices, preferably with something that fits in my pocket.

And to expand on the point above - focus is not painful when the camera has enough focus points. I played with a Nikon D3s that has a whooping 51 auto-focus points; let me tell that it's freaking awesome, as it can track your subject as it moves. The problem is that consumer-level DX DSLRs only have like 11 focus points, which is still cool, but point&shoots suck badly in this area, most of them focusing only in the center of the image.

Another problem with this project that I can see - people don't like playing with their images on the computer. When you take 500 photos in a single day, and another 600 photos the next day (like when going on a trip), it's really painful to carefully adjust each image, not to mention that the RAW formats are huge and seriously cuts in the number of photos you can take ... yeah, making adjustments is great, but I prefer making more photos, that's why I shoot in JPG and don't regret it.

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