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Lytro Unlock – Making a bad camera slightly better

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Re: Lytro Unlock – Making a bad camera slightly better

#21

Post by icelancer »

slopperyslip wrote: post #11
joshu wrote: post #2

I love this. I collect interesting obsolete hardware; I bought a Light L16 recently for cheap but it can no longer update itself, unfortunately. Lytro is on my list as well. The lytro itself is a lightfield / plenoptic camera. It captures the angle of light coming into the camera as well, which lets you calculate focus AFTER the photo has been taken. Focus is, of course, itself just another computation. http://graphi…

Was curious about a Light L19 seeing how cheap it is now and did some digging around for how to update. This Github project from an XDA thread may do the trick https://github.com/helloavo/Light-L16-Archive

Oh wow, this camera! I saw it years ago and never thought about it again. It's such an interesting idea for my field of work that wants variable focus throughout a video shot with high speed photography, but can't get it with the equipment that exists on the market.

Re: Lytro Unlock – Making a bad camera slightly better

#22

Post by weinzierl »

d1sxeyes wrote: post #14
joshu wrote: post #2

I love this. I collect interesting obsolete hardware; I bought a Light L16 recently for cheap but it can no longer update itself, unfortunately. Lytro is on my list as well. The lytro itself is a lightfield / plenoptic camera. It captures the angle of light coming into the camera as well, which lets you calculate focus AFTER the photo has been taken. Focus is, of course, itself just another computation. http://graphi…

That’s a really interesting way of phrasing it I’d never fully considered: of course you are right, a physical lens is just performing predictable mathematical transformations on the light passing through it. Thank you, that was something of a revelation in understanding how these cameras actually work.

"just performing predictable mathematical transformations"

Just linear algebra, to be precise. A lens is just a matrix and rays are simply vectors. Combining lenses is merely matrix multiplication and complex optical systems can be represented by the result, which is a plain simple matrix again. The Eigenvalues tell you interesting properties of your optical system.

I've always enjoyed this part of physics because it is so simple and elegant, yet so powerful.

If you look closely linear algebra pops up in many places.

Re: Lytro Unlock – Making a bad camera slightly better

#23

Post by WithinReason »

Firerouge wrote: post #7

Shame lytro never made a security video camera variant. Seems like the ideal application, ensuring that anything from vehicle plates in the background to faces in the foreground can be brought into focus. What sort of fps is the API capable of producing jpegs? It sounds like the larger illum can manage 3 fps natively, but couldn't find specs on the original lytro.

The images produced by Lytro are 1.2 megapixels, so not enough to resolve small detail.

Re: Lytro Unlock – Making a bad camera slightly better

#26

Post by rixrax »

Nice to see old Lytro hardware brought back to life.

When they were launching the company, I was so excited about the possibilities. Maybe naively, I was really rooting for being able to take a photo, and then in their software (and later in Lightroom) be able to slide/brush-in/out points of focus. Alas, all we got were these gimmicky square pictures that you could click to bring various parts to focus.

Re: Lytro Unlock – Making a bad camera slightly better

#27

Post by nathancahill »

rixrax wrote: post #26

Nice to see old Lytro hardware brought back to life. When they were launching the company, I was so excited about the possibilities. Maybe naively, I was really rooting for being able to take a photo, and then in their software (and later in Lightroom) be able to slide/brush-in/out points of focus. Alas, all we got were these gimmicky square pictures that you could click to bring various parts to focus.

Yeah, I think the concept is cool from a physics standpoint and the software didn't do it justice. If it had launched after iPhone shipped Portrait mode I think it might have angled more in that direction. My sense is that it came to market too early.

Re: Lytro Unlock – Making a bad camera slightly better

#28

Post by donatj »

I was just tweeting the other day about how my Lytro was really fun for a couple days and jogging through focus was neat but after the initial glow it was just an overpriced camera that gave me underwhelming 4 megapixel photos as the final product.

I had always hoped for better software to come along. I’ll be curious to see if it can find a second life.

Re: Lytro Unlock – Making a bad camera slightly better

#29

Post by atdrummond »

WithinReason wrote: post #23
Firerouge wrote: post #7

Shame lytro never made a security video camera variant. Seems like the ideal application, ensuring that anything from vehicle plates in the background to faces in the foreground can be brought into focus. What sort of fps is the API capable of producing jpegs? It sounds like the larger illum can manage 3 fps natively, but couldn't find specs on the original lytro.

The images produced by Lytro are 1.2 megapixels, so not enough to resolve small detail.

They had a “DSLR” which was about 4x higher resolution than the original device.

Re: Lytro Unlock – Making a bad camera slightly better

#30

Post by daniel_reetz »

Author, if you're reading, a really cool thing would be to create a small array of these cameras (4 of them) side by side.

The very wide baseline should allow you to enhance/deepen the refocusing effect and create a wide format image. I've always wanted to do this.

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