Pretty impressive.
I see noise even at this resolution. I also see really bad highlight clipping (the "hitting a wall" type of clipping) and purple fringing like color shifts in the transparent plastic right above the vinyl.
To see something interesting, take a look at the gray box in the lower left corner. In the absolute corner there's "increased resolution", and then to the right of this there's a sharp line where a more smudged area takes over. And no, that is not beacause of shallow DOF.
Also I see extreme amounts of noise even though it's downsampled to 1920 on the long side, especially in the black guys shirt. There seems to be lots of lost detail and and also loss of information in the shadows. Of course it would help to have full res images to say something substantial, but it doesn't look all that promising to me.
I was a little disappointed in the amount of noise and the noise reduction in this pic until I started thinking about how it would look with other cameras. Probably a blurry, noisy mess with cellphone or compacts. To get the same effect as this pic with a DSLR, you'd have to massively stop down that 50mm lens and would end up boosting the ISO so high that even a modern full-frame DSLR wouldn't be that much better.
But that's actually not the most important part.
The most important part is that there are only two cameras in my life: my "good" camera and my smartphone, aka the camera I use when I know I'm going to be taking photos, and the camera I have on me all the time.
Since this image is probably boosted and noise reduced and photoshopped to make it the most presentable representation of the product, I really think the same amount of effort would get you better results, for less money, out of a DSLR. If you're into spending money, the right DSLR and lens combo would get you far, far better results.
On the other hand, yes, DSLRs are bulky and you don't want to carry them everywhere. But the Light is not a smartphone, so it's yet another device to have to remember and carry around, so while it's smaller, I'm still likely to leave it home because I just don't think to bring cameras with me everywhere. I've got an older smartphone (Galaxy Note 3) that can take photos pretty near this quality in its fakey HDR mode. I've seen some shots out of the newest iPhone that very much rival this sort of photo. And that iPhone is cheaper than the Light, plus it's not an extra device.
all promotional photos anywhere are carefully photoshopped anyway.
It is HDR. Multiple exposures means you can capture the full dynamic range in one "shot" and synthesize together the nicely exposed parts of each image.
> I'm curious how much post-processing went into each of these.
I mean, a bunch, but the camera's firmware is doing it. I'm sure typical punch up postprocessing happened for publication, still the interesting dynamic range stuff is happening in the camera.
How most people end up shooting HDR, however, the component images mostly all have full detail in the shadows and highlights, meaning the final image really not much more than you've described. You can do that with a single shot and a contrast slider.
the advantage here is that the HDR frames can (presumably) be captured simultaneously, reducing motion blur
plus they seem to suggest some Lytro style ability to change the focus/depth of field after taking the photo
Yes, supposedly it outputs (or will output) raw/mosaiced DNGs[1]. I think it will be some time before we'll have access to these though. There's about a year until release and even the files available (downsampled to 1920 on the long side) looks noisy and a bit smeared (probably from noise reduction).
[1] http://support.light.co/hc/en-us/articles/205746673-What-ima...
Light is fusing (at capture time I think) a few normal-sized sensors each using different exposure duration, focal length, etc.
On the other hand Lytro collects a lot of tiny images each at the same exposure duration and focal length, but very close to each other. It's like having very big pixels but for each pixel you retain the color response from a large number of directions, instead of just the average color for that particular pixel, as in a regular camera.
Continuous refocusing can be performed after the fact in a Lytro, not possible (or very limited) with the Light. But the Light should be able to do native HDR in one take (and real time HDR video maybe), not possible with a Lytro.
I had an interesting reaction reading this: I'm totally sold on the idea and science behind this. We have large scale radio telescopes, why not cameras?
But, I'm super turned off by the proposed plan: modified android OS combined with the promo photos makes me think viewfinder lag is going to be a bitch. v1 seems likely to feel like a janky short-run phone from a new manufacturer. Which is too bad, because the concept and possibilities are amazing.
Light; the articles mentioned a partnership with FoxConn; why not work with them or Samsung to put one out that you just license tech for?
And, it would be cool to see some high res samples.