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Lytro is winding down

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Re: Lytro is winding down

#41

Post by giobox »

anentropic wrote: post #35
auvi wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wondering, which DSLR in particular?

it's not a DSLR, but some recent Panasonic mirrorless cameras have this https://www.panasonic.com/global/consumer/lumix/feature/post...

This isn’t really all that comparable to the Lytro - this is effectively a hack that takes advantage of some Panasonic camera’s ability to shoot 4K jpeg bursts at 30FPS - it racks the focus as it shoots a burst so you can pick from a range of focus points. The subject can still move noticeably in between shots, it’s not a single shot style solution like the Lytro has. I have a Panasonic m43 camera with this feature and almost never use it, It’s just a fast implementation of focus bracketing and you take a pretty big resolution/quality hit.

The new “Dual Pixel AF” sensors in some newer Canon DSLRs is much more like the Lytro, in that focus can be adjusted slightly in a single image capture, no burst capture trickery.

Re: Lytro is winding down

#42

Post by transistor-man »

As someone who owned a Lytro Illumn, it was surprisingly a wonderful piece of hardware. Its massive and always gets interesting questions from onlookers. It was clear a lot of effort went into bringing a Shack–Hartmann wavefront sensor into the hands of a consumer. Sure it felt prototype-y, but it wasn't vaporware. It'd be wonderful if they opened up the development environment for the camera itself.

Re: Lytro is winding down

#43

Post by WillPostForFood »

acdha wrote: post #26
danso wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Media tries -- and is able -- to do a lot more than it did in the past. e.g. as terrible and annoying as linkrot is, most webpages are able to reach an audience far larger and far more disperse than what could be served by any library or printing press. Nevermind having the passive/latent feature of being cheaply and (hopefully) perpetually archived by services like Internet Archive. The Lytro embeds, unlike physical…

> most webpages are able to reach an audience far larger and far more disperse than what could be served by any library or printing press Most webpages don’t have the reach of a mid-sized city newspaper in the 20th century. A few approach the reach of a major city newspaper, wire service like AP or Reuters, or radio/TV network – think about what percentage of the world could hear the BBC! Facebook or Google have thos…

Most webpages don’t have the reach of a mid-sized city newspaper in the 20th century. A few approach the reach of a major city newspaper, wire service like AP or Reuters..,

If you look at the 1990 circulation numbers, they are small for mid-sized cities, and even for large cities. The NY Times circulation was just over a million, there are hundreds of webpages with that kind of reach now.

http://adage.com/images/random/0309/4-1990s-030909.pdf

Re: Lytro is winding down

#44

Post by jstandard »

eecsninja wrote: post #40

I got an offer from Lytro in 2012 but I turned it down to stay at Google, where I still work. At the time, I considered Lytro because it had real, substantial technology behind it, and was not just some trivial social networking app. I turned it down because assuming a $1B exit, my shares would still not have been that much more than what I got from Google. Six years later, I am doing much better (more earnings, more…

> It really calls into question the dominant Silicon Valley culture and narrative that we should join startups and change the world with new technologies.

This sounds like a non sequitur. The main reason you joined Google over Lytro was money and quality of life.

There's nothing wrong with that. You didn't have as strong of a desire to change the world by building Lytro's new camera technologies. Others who were likely in similar situations balanced that equation differently.

Re: Lytro is winding down

#45

Post by vitovito »

danso wrote: post #15
kevingadd wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty wild to click through to the Verge review and all the photo embeds are dead because they were using Lytro's services. Media is so short-lived these days.

Media tries -- and is able -- to do a lot more than it did in the past. e.g. as terrible and annoying as linkrot is, most webpages are able to reach an audience far larger and far more disperse than what could be served by any library or printing press. Nevermind having the passive/latent feature of being cheaply and (hopefully) perpetually archived by services like Internet Archive. The Lytro embeds, unlike physical…

The Internet Archive capture of that page should have working embeds now: https://web.archive.org/web/20170317183900/http://www.thever...

They take a little while to load once you click on them; it's dozens and dozens of files.

The data for the embeds may still exist on Lytro's CDN, if you know the UUID for the image, and could be rescued and rehosted. After they shut their hosting service down last year, I crawled every embed the Internet Archive had, and downloaded the additional JSON and JPEG assets necessary to restore the embeds. https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Lytro

Re: Lytro is winding down

#46

Post by s73v3r_ »

jstandard wrote: post #44
eecsninja wrote: post #40

I got an offer from Lytro in 2012 but I turned it down to stay at Google, where I still work. At the time, I considered Lytro because it had real, substantial technology behind it, and was not just some trivial social networking app. I turned it down because assuming a $1B exit, my shares would still not have been that much more than what I got from Google. Six years later, I am doing much better (more earnings, more…

> It really calls into question the dominant Silicon Valley culture and narrative that we should join startups and change the world with new technologies. This sounds like a non sequitur. The main reason you joined Google over Lytro was money and quality of life. There's nothing wrong with that. You didn't have as strong of a desire to change the world by building Lytro's new camera technologies. Others who were like…

"You didn't have as strong of a desire to change the world"

That's a rather dickish thing to say. Especially because, as we've seen time and time again, very, very few of these startups are actually "changing the world". More and more, being asked to join a startup is just being asked to overwork yourself for peanuts and then be screwed out of equity.

Re: Lytro is winding down

#47

Post by kup0 »

s73v3r_ wrote: post #46
jstandard wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It really calls into question the dominant Silicon Valley culture and narrative that we should join startups and change the world with new technologies. This sounds like a non sequitur. The main reason you joined Google over Lytro was money and quality of life. There's nothing wrong with that. You didn't have as strong of a desire to change the world by building Lytro's new camera technologies. Others who were like…

"You didn't have as strong of a desire to change the world" That's a rather dickish thing to say. Especially because, as we've seen time and time again, very, very few of these startups are actually "changing the world". More and more, being asked to join a startup is just being asked to overwork yourself for peanuts and then be screwed out of equity.

Yeah, the phrase has become meaningless marketing drivel that a lot of startups use to describe their likely not-world-changing products.

Re: Lytro is winding down

#48

Post by jstandard »

s73v3r_ wrote: post #46
jstandard wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It really calls into question the dominant Silicon Valley culture and narrative that we should join startups and change the world with new technologies. This sounds like a non sequitur. The main reason you joined Google over Lytro was money and quality of life. There's nothing wrong with that. You didn't have as strong of a desire to change the world by building Lytro's new camera technologies. Others who were like…

"You didn't have as strong of a desire to change the world" That's a rather dickish thing to say. Especially because, as we've seen time and time again, very, very few of these startups are actually "changing the world". More and more, being asked to join a startup is just being asked to overwork yourself for peanuts and then be screwed out of equity.

Thanks for pointing this out, I can see where what I wrote could be misinterpreted.

What I meant was the full sentence. GP specifically wasn't interested in what Lytro was building strongly enough to take the pay cut.

Agree the "we're changing/disrupting the world" meme gets misused.

I'll make an edit for clarity. Disrespect was not my intent.

Edit: the edit window on my original post just closed.

Re: Lytro is winding down

#49

Post by tropo »

eecsninja wrote: post #40

I got an offer from Lytro in 2012 but I turned it down to stay at Google, where I still work. At the time, I considered Lytro because it had real, substantial technology behind it, and was not just some trivial social networking app. I turned it down because assuming a $1B exit, my shares would still not have been that much more than what I got from Google. Six years later, I am doing much better (more earnings, more…

"I think about how things might have been different if I had accepted that offer. It really calls into question the dominant Silicon Valley culture and narrative that we should join startups and change the world with new technologies."

You would have made them succeed. Without you, they failed.

Re: Lytro is winding down

#50

Post by knolan »

auvi wrote: post #29
knolan wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The two cameras I have, original and Illium were pretty stable. Very slow but I didn’t experience any crashing whatsoever. Ultimately Lytro will be a footnote in camera history. We’re already seeing scaled back implementations in SLRs and smart phones.

Just wondering, which DSLR in particular?

The Canon 5D mk IV has what’s called Dual Pixel RAW. Here’s a video.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HcQ9MSRRvn4

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