Lytro's "industrial design"

There's been a lot of back-and-forth about the effectiveness, and the usefulness, of the Lytro plenoptic camera. But one thing that isn't being discussed much is the styling. The Lytro presentation made a big thing about the industrial design of their camera. Square, one button, etc.

It's not new, though: it's a totally familiar shape. I had a flashlight like that over 30 years ago. They're still making flashlights in that form factor.

Which one's the Lytro?











The plenoptic cameras flashlights can be found here, if anyone wants to get their hands on some serious style:

http://flashlight.100-gift.com/products/813/Waterproof-Stong-Light-Flashlight-3412.html

http://www.lightgod.com/product/939-sqkyl-b/Light-Up-Keychain-Flashlight-Square-Blue.aspx

http://www.alibaba.com/product-gs/477062677/led_torch_flashlight.html

http://www.meritline.com/aluminum-cree-led-flashlight-with-lanyard---p-65893.aspx

--
Rahon Klavanian 1912-2008.

Armenian genocide survivor, amazing cook, scrabble master, and loving grandmother. You will be missed.

Ciao! Joseph

http://www.swissarmyfork.com

Ah, well your red and yellow ones both have arrays of LEDs. They probably just bought a load of those and reverse biased the LEDs to turn them in to photodetectors! ;-)

Sorry Joseph, but you are obviously biased against Lytro and their new camera, for some unknown reason.

Their design is brilliant for all I know: it's ideally simple and straightforward. Yes it does resemble a torchlight in handling, it doesn't have either the shape of a smartphone or the shape of a camera, so what?
--
Andrew
Novice photographer

--
Antonio

http://ferrer.smugmug.com/

Joseph S Wisniewski said:

(...) They're still making flashlights in that [parallelepiped] form factor. (...)

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But there's a major and no-go ergonomic difference from a camera: a flashlight is seldom, if ever, used at eye level. (Unless it's a police-issue one, to be used as a baton at a flick of the wrist).
--

“A camera has interesting ideas of its own." --John Szarkowski (no connection with lomography)

Pangloss said:

Sorry Joseph, but you are obviously biased against Lytro and their new camera, for some unknown reason.

Their design is brilliant for all I know: it's ideally simple and straightforward.

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+1 for this.

Pangloss said:

Yes it does resemble a torchlight in handling, it doesn't have either the shape of a smartphone or the shape of a camera, so what?

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One advantage of this is street photography where people would not even notice that a camera took photo. It is way off from the camera image general public have in mind. Which is good for a photographer.

--
::> I make spelling mistakes. May Dog forgive me for this.

Three things are already in works - pistol grip, head-mounted display, and RPG-style shoulder bracket. LOL.

--
http://www.libraw.org/

...and all you guys jump up and bag him! I find that hard to understand. I've always admired the entrepreneurial spirit of the North American research community.

Joe

zxaar said:

Pangloss said:

Sorry Joseph, but you are obviously biased against Lytro and their new camera, for some unknown reason.

Their design is brilliant for all I know: it's ideally simple and straightforward.

Click to expand...

+1 for this.

zxaar said:

Yes it does resemble a torchlight in handling, it doesn't have either the shape of a smartphone or the shape of a camera, so what?

Click to expand...

One advantage of this is street photography where people would not even notice that a camera took photo. It is way off from the camera image general public have in mind. Which is good for a photographer.

Click to expand...

They could be even more clever and put a second viewfinder screen on the side for ultra discretion...

zxaar said:

--
::> I make spelling mistakes. May Dog forgive me for this.

Click to expand...

Joe Pineapples said:

...and all you guys jump up and bag him! I find that hard to understand. I've always admired the entrepreneurial spirit of the North American research community.

Joe

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I agree with you, but then again Lytro is selling something you can't yet try first. You just have to trust them with your 400 or 500 dollars.

Focus bracketing could do the same thing quite easily, particularly with an image as small as 540x540 pixels, I hope this isn't the case here.

By turning his research efforts into a practical product within a short time is quite an achievement. For that I salute him.

The question I have is that it has an optical lens like any other camera and so it would have a focusing point (may be set to infinity) when taking a photo. So this "original" photo taken must be focused at certain point. Would then this "original" photo of quality better than those "re-focuing" ones (most probably generated by software)? How big would the difference in quality be?

Joe Pineapples said:

...and all you guys jump up and bag him! I find that hard to understand. I've always admired the entrepreneurial spirit of the North American research community.

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