Comment by chychiu
7 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)
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.
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.
> I find it very useful for wildlife photos. Autofocus never seems to work well for me on e.g. birds in flight.
The more recent cameras can detect birds specifically and are great at tracking them.
> It's also possible to generate a depth map from a single shot, to use as a starting point for a 3D model.
That is true, but is a very niche need. Wonderful if you do need it, but it's a small market.
There is a limit to the resolution needed by consumers, so in that sense maybe they were too early.
I'd argue the opposite, consumers need more resolution than pros.
A pro will show up with a 300mm f/2.8, a tripod, a camera with good AF and high ISO, and the skills, plan and patience to catch birds in flight.
But all that stuff is expensive. The consumer way to approximate the lack of a good lens is a small, high res sensor. That only works in bright light, but you can get good results with affordable equipment in the right conditions. Greatly reducing the resolution is far from optimal when you can't have a big fancy lens to compensate.
And where is focus the hardest? Mostly where you want to have high detail. Wildlife, macro, sports.