← Back to context

Comment by hbarka

11 hours ago

I remember Lytro. There was a lot of fanfare behind that company and then they fizzled. They had a lauded CEO/founder and their website demonstrated clearly how the post-focus worked. It felt like they were going to be the next camera revolution. Their rise and demise story would make a good Isaacson-style documentary.

8 comments

hbarka

Reply
hyperific  4 hours ago

If I recall correctly they got scooped up by Google and their team was merged into various Google teams. I was disappointed to hear of their fizzling as well. They were just starting to dive into serious movie production light field cameras when it happened. They had an incredible tech demo on their website showcasing its power. I can't seem to locate the original but there are bits of it in the linked video.

https://youtu.be/4qXE4sA-hLQ?si=QsEG2PtAmVjIfwDA

chychiu  10 hours ago

I think the product was just too early for its time, and there is not much demand for it. For what it's worth, the founder (Ren Ng) went back to academia, and was highly instrumental in computer vision research, e.g. being the PI on the paper for NeRF: (https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3503250)

  • dale_glass  7 hours ago

    I don't think it was quite too early, it just makes tradeoffs that are undesirable.

    Lytro as I understand it, trades a huge amount of resolution for the focusing capability. Some ridiculous amount, like the user gets to see just 1/8th of the pixels on the sensor.

    In a way, I'd say rather than too early it was too late. Because autofocus was already quite good and getting better. You don't need to sacrifice all that resolution when you can just have good AF to start with. Refocusing in post is a very rare need if you got the focus right initially.

    And time has only made that even worse. Modern autofocus is darn near magic, and people love their high resolution photos.

    • blincoln  6 hours ago

      I find it very useful for wildlife photos. Autofocus never seems to work well for me on e.g. birds in flight.

      It's also possible to generate a depth map from a single shot, to use as a starting point for a 3D model.

      They're pretty neat cameras. The relatively low output resolution is the main downside. They would also have greatly benefited from consulting with more photographers on the UI of the hardware and software. There's way too much dependency on using the touchscreen instead of dedicated physical controls.

      1 reply →