I think you’re missing the point and should really read the articles. This is a new technology where supposedly the camera…”will bring the biggest change to photography since the transition from film to digital…The breakthrough is a different type of sensor that captures what are known as light fields — basically, all the light that is moving in all directions in the view of the camera. That offers several advantages over traditional photography, the most revolutionary of which is that photos no longer need to be focused before they are taken…Lytro’s camera works by positioning an array of tiny lenses between the main lens and the image sensor, with the microlenses measuring both the total amount of light coming in as well as its direction.

The technology also allows photos to be taken in very low-light conditions without a flash, as well as for some eye-popping three-dimensional images to be taken with just a single lens.”

“The Lytro camera is a light-field, or plenoptic, camera. An array of micro-lenses sits over the camera’s sensor, capturing all the light in the scene being photographed (11 million rays of light, to be precise). The Lytro then saves your image in a proprietary file format to deliver a “living picture” that you can manipulate on your computer, much like a raw file. By manipulating key attributes, you can effectively change the focus of the image. That’s right: After the image has been taken.”

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/10/lytro-camera/

I don’t purport to be an optical lens or software engineer. I’ve had my share through the years of semi-professional Canon, Minolta and Nikon cameras and darkrooms. And I’ve handled the “raw” format as well. But this sensor innervation seems to fulfill that little nag that most of us get when we bring our photographs home and become dissatisfied when we didn’t get that perfect focus shot we thought we had captured. The whole camera measures 1.61 x 1.61 x 4.41 inches and only has two buttons…one for shutter and one for power. It has an f/2 lens with an 8x zoom and an LCD display for composition. The pictures aren’t measured in megapixels but megarays instead. I think the progression of the technology is just wonderful.

 

 

 

 

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