Your suggestion about 3D is impossible. You can only make it with 2 lens points with a distance in between. Otherwise you wont see the part that the left eye can see, but is hidden by a head in the view from the right eye.

Your argument for snapshots is invalid too. People don’t want to process pictures afterwards. The lytro might be fast, but the viewfinder isn’t. Have a look at a Nikon V1, and see what is more relevant to snapshots. That camera takes 10 pics in a second, and selects the one with the most open eyes and smiles. That is what the Facebook generation wants to post their party straight to the net in 1 second.

Your suggestion about 3D is impossible. You can only make it with 2 lens points with a distance in between. Otherwise you wont see the part that the left eye can see, but is hidden by a head in the view from the right eye.

Your argument for snapshots is invalid too. People don’t want to process pictures afterwards. The lytro might be fast, but the viewfinder isn’t. Have a look at a Nikon V1, and see what is more relevant to snapshots. That camera takes 10 pics in a second, and selects the one with the most open eyes and smiles. That is what the Facebook generation wants to post their party straight to the net in 1 second.

1) The Lytro takes pictures much faster than a traditional camera, because it doesn’t need to focus, so you can just point and take pictures with no lag time. That’s going to make a huge difference for parents (for example) who are taking pictures of kids, who move rapidly so there’s no time to focus, compose, etc.

2) Yes, you could take a picture that’s in focus at all depths, but that’s not the same thing as being able to focus at an depth, because it’s important for photo composition that the things that you don’t want people to focus on be “out of focus”. Cameras that take pictures in focus at all distances produce painfully distracting photo’s, because there’s no point of focus.

You do make a good point that there’s a tradeoff between capturing the entire lightfield and resolution. If you capture 10m rays of light, that gives you the ability for the viewer to extract 1m pixel images, focused on different areas. That gives the viewer (or photographer) a lot of control over the photo composition after it’s taken, which is very powerful, but the cost of that flexibility is resolution.

So while you might be right that to a professional photographer taking carefully posed and composed photo’s for print the Lytro isn’t appropriate. But to a normal person taking pictures that won’t wait for careful composition and focus, for video/web use, the Lytro is pretty appealing.

There are also other interesting applications of having all of the raw data from the lightfield available. For example, it should be possible to generate 3D stereo pair images out of a single lightfield. And who knows what over clever tricks people come up with, once they get their hands on the raw lightfield data.

1) The Lytro takes pictures much faster than a traditional camera, because it doesn’t need to focus, so you can just point and take pictures with no lag time. That’s going to make a huge difference for parents (for example) who are taking pictures of kids, who move rapidly so there’s no time to focus, compose, etc.

2) Yes, you could take a picture that’s in focus at all depths, but that’s not the same thing as being able to focus at an depth, because it’s important for photo composition that the things that you don’t want people to focus on be “out of focus”. Cameras that take pictures in focus at all distances produce painfully distracting photo’s, because there’s no point of focus.

You do make a good point that there’s a tradeoff between capturing the entire lightfield and resolution. If you capture 10m rays of light, that gives you the ability for the viewer to extract 1m pixel images, focused on different areas. That gives the viewer (or photographer) a lot of control over the photo composition after it’s taken, which is very powerful, but the cost of that flexibility is resolution.

So while you might be right that to a professional photographer taking carefully posed and composed photo’s for print the Lytro isn’t appropriate. But to a normal person taking pictures that won’t wait for careful composition and focus, for video/web use, the Lytro is pretty appealing.

There are also other interesting applications of having all of the raw data from the lightfield available. For example, it should be possible to generate 3D stereo pair images out of a single lightfield. And who knows what over clever tricks people come up with, once they get their hands on the raw lightfield data.