Revolutionary "Light Field" camera tech - shoot-first, focus-later
The downsides, which, of course, this press release doesn't mention:<p>- Greatly, greatly reduced image resolution. Great big dedicated-camera sized lens and image sensor, cellphone-camera sized pictures. 1680×1050, at most. (1.76MP)<p>- Color aberration. The microlenses have to be small, of course, so they're going to be made of single physical elements, rather than doublets.[1]<p>- Various amusing aliasing problems. (note the fine horizontal lines on some of the demo shots)<p>- Low FPS. Each image requires lots of processing, which means the CPU will have to chew on data for a while before you can take another image.<p>- Proprietary toolchain for the dynamic images. Sure, cameras all have their particular RAW sensor formats, but this is also going to have its own output image format. No looking at thumbnails in file browsers. Photoshop won't have any idea what to do with it. Can't print it, of course.<p>- - You can just produce a composite image that's sharp all over, but why not use a conventional camera with stopped-down[2] lens, then?<p>- It's going to be really thrillingly expensive. This is a given, of course, with new camera technology.<p>[1]: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublet_(lens)" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublet_(lens)</a>
[2]: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F/stop#Effects_on_image_quality" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F/stop#Effects_on_image_quality</a>