Project ENIAC: Lytro’s Magical DSLR-Like Camera Lets You Refocus Photos After You Take Them

When Lytro first unveiled its light-field photography concept — whose most useful feature is the ability to refocus photographs around any object within them — there was a lot of excitement. But once the startup released its first camera in spring 2012, the criticism began. The product got mixed reviews, with some saying the expensive, low-res camera didn't quite live up to the vision.

Now Lytro is ready for its second act. It unveils Tuesday a camera aimed at "creative pioneers," which takes light-field photography to a new level. Called the Illum (i-LOOM), the camera overcomes many of the limitations of the first model: It's higher-resolution, doesn't just shoot square photos, and it gives the photographer much more flexibility in customizing exactly how the camera captures the "light field."

It's also enormous. I got a little hands-on time with a prototype Illum, and as cameras go, it's a chunky monkey. (It weighs 2.07 pounds.) At first glance it looks simply like a hefty DSLR camera, but there are a couple of important differences, aside from sheer size.

First is the lens, which is fixed to the camera body. As with the first Lytro model, a big chunk of the magic is in the optics, and the Illum's lens contributes greatly to the weight. Just like the smaller Lytro, the lens in the larger Illum has a fixed f/2.0 aperture, which is needed to let in enough light to capture the whole "light field."

Another odd part of the design: The back LCD is angled downward. Lytro designed it that way because the camera doesn't have a viewfinder. The company found that when people take photos using just an LCD screen, they tend to hold the camera below their eye level, so slanting the back came naturally. Helpfully, the display is also on an articulating arm.

"The Lytro Illum is the first hardware and software platform built from the ground up for creative pioneers," Lytro CEO Jason Rosenthal told Mashable. "The first time around, it was like, 'Lytro is exciting and super promising... we just want more power.' We've come back and given people a lot more power."

Light field 2.0

Quick refresher on light-field photography: Lytro's camera technology captures not just the color and intensity of light, but also its direction. That allows for all sorts of tricks once you snap the picture, including the ability to refocus the image as well as create a parallax effect, where you can shift the perspective slightly — similar to how a 3D camera works.

One of the ways the Illum takes that experience further is by displaying the focus range in a histogram to the right of the image on the LCD. Although the software on the models that I used was an early version, it did the trick: I could choose point in the image that would serve as the "center of focus," the point around which the picture will refocus best. There doesn't even have to be an object at the depth of field you're choosing — something the smaller Lytro can't do. The histogram is yellow in this focusing range, fading to brown at the edges of it.

To help you even further, you can turn on a assistive feature that will overlay green outlines on all the objects that are within this focusing range; if objects lack the lines, they'll be permanently out of focus. I found the outlining to be even more useful than the historgram, although it made everything look funny on the LCD.

"One of the things that can be challenging about light-field photography is... composing in 3D," says Rosenthal. "The histogram shows you in the image itself the different points of depth."

The physical controls are very simple. You can twist the lens to zoom, and there's a button to call up those outlines. From there, you can twist the smaller ring on the lens to choose your center of focus, or just tap the screen on the object you want to focus around. A pair of dials, one in front and one in back, let you adjust shutter speed (down to 1/4,000 second), ISO and other manual controls. Once you're ready, hit the shutter.

Image upgrade

The camera captures images with 40 "megarays" — a near-meaningless term that's only relevant in the context of Lytro (the smaller camera captures 11-megaray images). The spec translates to images of about 4 megapixels, once they're flattened out.

That should address most of the criticism directed at Lytro over its first product's low-res images, but in any case the Lytro images are interesting because of their nature, not their resolution. A software upgrade that will launch in conjunction with the camera will help on that

Whether you see it as a weakness or a strength, Lytro images are dependent on the viewer to do something — either tap to refocus or shift the perspective. But the new Lytro software will unlock their magic to passive viewers by letting users export the images as videos. Instead of a static image the viewer needs to touch, it'll instead refocus or move before their eyes.

The Illum seems poised to move Lytro and its light-field tech forward... until you look at its price. The camera goes on sale in July for $1,599. Buyers can begin pre-ordering the Illum today, and if you pre-order before July 15, the price goes down to $1,499.

That's still a large chunk of change to lay down on a camera that probably still won't serve as your primary imaging device. The Lytro Illum will likely find an even smaller niche than the original Lytro carved out for itself, but the company is aware of this, and promises its strategy will address all types of photographers, at all skill and income levels.

"This thing is totally state-of-the-art," says Ren Ng, Lytro's chairman and founder. "It's unprecedented — you'll never see a lens like this out there. I think the real value is the quality of the pictures and how differentiated a visual experience these creative pioneers will be able to share with their audiences."