Lytro Camera - A Harbinger of the Light Field

Introduction

The Lytro Light Field camera is an intriguing device and quite unlike any other camera that has come before. A light field camera doesn’t capture light the same way a conventional camera does. Instead, it captures the 'light field', information which contains the direction of light. This allows it to do some mind-bending things, like change the point of focus after an image has already been captured. Light field cameras aren't new, but they've been massive devices constrained to concept labs. Lytro (the company) is the first to miniaturize and commercialize this technology.

Design & Handling

Looking distinctly unlike a century of camera designs, the Lytro's rectangular shape feels solid in the hand. Made of anodized aluminum and silicon rubber, the Lytro feels distinguished and well-made. The lens cap cleverly attaches itself using magnets; it's strong enough to stay on but can be dislodged in a messy bag. The 1.5" touch-screen LCD is responsive, you browse images just by swiping the screen and the menus are easy to navigate.

There are only two buttons, the shutter release on top which doubles as a power switch, and a power switch on the bottom. A touch-sensitive strip lets you zoom in and out by gliding your finger along it. A single mini-USB port lets you connect to a PC and charge the Lytro. Start-up is as good as instantaneous.

Lytro says that the form of the camera follows function but we think Lytro might have taken the principle a little too literally. Its design builds the camera around the lens' long barrel, but it really should have followed the purpose of serving the photographer instead of the function of the hardware.

There's no comfortable way to grasp the Lytro. If you hold it like a torchlight with your index finger on the shutter, you're likely to move the camera downwards every time you press the shutter. Because the zoom slide sits behind the shutter, you can't zoom and shoot single-handedly (unless you use your third finger on the shutter, which isn't very comfortable).

Zooming is a long-winded affair. You have to stroke the strip in order to zoom once, if you want to zoom till the end you have to keep stroking and stroking the camera. The Lytro should just let you tap and hold on each end in order to zoom in and out. Because the strip is nearly invisible, it's easy to swipe it by accident.

We would have preferred a bigger screen, trying to frame through the 1.5" screen is difficult. The screen also has limited viewing angles, tilt the Lytro and the screen will typically wash out. In bright sunlight, it's impossible to make out what's on the screen.

Image Performance

The promise of the Lytro is its ability to refocus a shot after the fact, and it delivers – with some caveats. While you can change focus, it doesn't mean that everything you focus on after taking the picture will be sharp.

While light field technology frees the Lytro from some of the limits of traditional photography, it's still bound to the same old rules. Constraints like shutter speed, aperture and ISO still apply. You won't always get sharp subjects if you're shooting at low shutter speeds and they're moving or if you've moved the camera. Or even sharp images across entire focal planes because something might just be too far or too near.

Not all subjects will produce dramatic results with the focus shifting. If your image is quite flat, with subjects close together, there isn't much change when you shift focus from point to point. Images with some distance between foreground and background work best. Image quality is more Instagram than compact camera. Being 1MP images, there's not much detail in them. High ISO shots can be muddy with some banding visible in some images.

*Note: You need Adobe Flash to see the images below.

The Lytro has two shooting modes, one which will make refocusing easier and one which takes a little more work. The first is Everyday mode, which limits the zoom range to 3.5x. In this mode, the camera will set the re-focus range, or the distance in which subjects can be refocused, automatically. Because the Lytro doesn't need to pre-focus before taking a shot, you can shoot pretty much instantaneously in this mode, and most of your subjects will remain acceptably sharp when you re-focus them later.

Creative mode unlocks the Lytro's full 8x optical zoom, which is an astonishing 35mm equivalent of 43-340mm with a constant f/2 aperture. But the focus range also becomes shallower, and in Creative mode you need to define the focus distance yourself. This means you need to tap to focus and then to take the shot. It's possible to shoot without pre-focusing like you do in Everyday mode, but there's the chance that subjects will turn out blurry if they fall outside of the focus range. When you tap to re-focus on the blurry areas afterwards these subjects remain blurred.

The first image below shows you what we mean. The focus was mistakenly placed on the back wall, way out of the shallow focus range available in Creative mode. So while you can tap to re-focus on the bird cage, it stays blurry. The second image was properly focused on the old man on the left before taking the picture.

While you can already get up pretty close to your subject in Everyday mode, Creative mode unlocks the ability to shoot almost touching your subject. It opens up interesting possibilities for macro photography, and Lytro even says that the camera has no minimum focusing distance – which means you should be able to get as close as you want. In practice though, you have to watch to see that you place your focus correctly, but the Lytro's small low-density screen doesn’t help much when trying to eyeball precise focus on very small or close-up objects.

To view your images, you need to plug your Lytro into a PC and install the Lytro Desktop app. The images are saved to a proprietary format, weighing in at about 16MB each and must be viewed using the Lytro Desktop app. Once the app is installed, you can play around with re-focusing your images. The Lytro Desktop app is another example where Lytro is simplifying the shooting experience, but has perhaps simplified it too much; there's not much you can do within the app to edit your images.

The good news is that you can share these 'living pictures' so that others can also play with the focus. The bad news is that in order to do that, you have to upload them to Lytro's website. You can then share your living pictures with sites like Facebook and embed them on your blog, with Lytro hosting and serving the files, like on this page.

If you prefer to share images the good old way, you can always export your images out to tiny 1080 x 1080 (approx. 1MP) JPEGs. Of course, the re-focusing feature then doesn't work. 

Conclusion

The truth is that being able to re-focus your images, while fun and great for recovering from focus mistakes, gets old pretty quickly. The effect's only pronounced when you have images with clear foreground and background subjects. If the composition's pretty flat, not much changes when you re-focus an image. Photographers also prefer to use a shallow depth of field to enhance composition, allowing others to switch focus can rob the image of its original power.

While the Lytro gives you much more leeway than a conventional camera, it doesn't free you from having to consider things like shutter speed and ISO. The problem is that the Lytro abstracts these things away, so without control you may be able to re-focus the focal plane on a subject, but that subject may be blurred on an otherwise sharp focal plane due to an all-too-slow shutter speed. Lytro previewed an update for us where these camera controls will be opened up to the user, but we're not sure how usable they'll be with the camera's limited controls.

The Lytro is something altogether new, but there's a lingering sense that it has tried a little too hard to be original. There are reasons why cameras have evolved to the way they've become, and Lytro could have used some of these lessons. Many times we found ourselves wishing the camera could have been shaped like a conventional camera with a viewfinder, just so that we could have a stable body on which to hold and frame the shot from.

We sound bearish on the Lytro, but we're actually bullish on its potential. It's an instant-on camera which takes pictures instantly without having to pre-focus. Focusing mistakes are virtually eliminated because now you can change focus after the fact.

In addition to these, Lytro showed us some previews of future features which are very exciting. There's one feature that lets you slightly shift not just focus but also perspective; it feels like you're able to move slightly around your subjects. Another feature lets you not just select one focal plane, but have everything in the image be in focus (i.e. focus stacking from a single image).

With the help of 3D glasses, Lytro also showed us an ability to see photographs in 3D – reader; it's a heavy emotional experience. Photos don’t feel like flat pieces of paper anymore, they gain an immediate reality that hits you on a deep level. Another potential feature of Light Field photography is the ability to capture and manipulate all intensities of light – in other words, true HDR images captured with a single shot. These are all exciting possibilities, some of which are already scheduled to arrive.

When we were using the Lytro, we couldn't help but imagine what a more powerful camera with this kind of technology would be like – something with optical image stabilization, a bright zoom lens and the ability to output high-resolution JPEGs. That camera could very well redefine everything.

Lytro deserves a standing ovation for bringing Light Field technology to market, and building a brand new idea of a camera from the ground up. At the same time, it's clear that the current Lytro is a first-generation proof-of-concept that's full of promise, but just isn't there yet. This is a camera that you'd carry for fun, but not one you'd rely on as a main camera. S$648 (8GB)/S$778 (16GB) for a toy sounds expensive to us, but while we can't heartily recommend the Lytro, we dearly hope the company makes even more cameras. Lytro has a chance to advance the state of photography, and we'd like to see that happen.

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