Posted 06.21.2011 at 12:50 pm
6 Comments
For all its virtues, digital photography has yet to correct one age-old weakness: If you blow the focus, you’ve most likely lost the shot. An emerging lens system, known as plenoptics, will change that. The product of more than a decade of research from Adobe and institutions including Stanford and Indiana universities, plenoptic cameras capture multiple focal settings in one snap, so users can refocus after the fact. The German-made Raytrix R11 is the first mass-produced plenoptic camera available in the U.S.
Click here to browse other gadgets that keep pictures sharp.
Post-shoot refocusing requires a camera that captures thousands of separate paths of light. Plenoptic cameras have an array of micro-lenses on top of the image sensor; the R11 has 40,000. As light travels through those lenses, it fractures into 40,000 separate image fragments. Computer software decodes the files to compose a final image; adjusting the focus is as simple as moving an onscreen slider to tweak the depth of field. Photographers can also view two slightly different angles to create stereoscopic 3-D stills and video.
40,000 Lenses: Courtesy Raytrix
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I love my Nikon a little less now. lol Despite that, I'm really excited about this. $30k means there's no way I'll be one of the early adopters, but I'm anxiously looking forward to it being affordable one day.
Combined with CCTV blurry security videos are a gone. With this level of sophistication digital face mapping will be an automatic process. This might work well with facility security as well as public gatherings.
Once this is developed to a marketable level, the price will drop, but with that day is a long way off. Expect governments will have first crack at it.
Fly eyes!
Glass lenses no matter how fine always ran up against the laws of physics as they apply to light.
Not only can this new system make out of focus pictures a thing of the past but also increase depth of focus and field infinitely. A single image can be in focus from near to far—even a perfectly focused shot cannot do that.
Moreover, sensitivity and resolution can be greatly improved beyond what any camera could do before.
And finally, parallax can be eliminated.
I want one!
having stuff out of focus is what makes photos look cool...
Stumped!!!
That was my idea, well I had an idea kinda like that. I was going to set up multiple lenses that would spin around the image sensor. The setup was going to be similar to how the old VHS heads spun around the tape, but in reverse.
It would have allowed infinite zooming as an image would be captured each time a lens went by. The lenses would also be zooming in and out one step as it passed the sensor.
No need for mechanical lenses now! There idea is much better, I never would have though of doing it that way.
So 99.9999999999999% of the data captured is bad and useless.
Dumb idea.