The Light L16 – a multi-aperture computational camera

Re:The Light L16 – a multi-aperture computational camera by jerich on Thursday October 08, 2015 @02:53AM (#10351262)

If you take a look through the FAQ, they do say that they are designing it to work within common photography workflows, giving example formats of JPEG, TIFF, and raw DNG (though I'm assuming the DNG is after their proprietary postprocessing, not a set of the true raw sensor outputs). They're asking for input going forward, so take a few minutes to express your concerns about workflow and maybe it will be a better product for it.

I believe they are doing quite a bit of stacking, as they say they are processing up to 130 megapixels from 10 sensors to get the final image. There should definitely be a dynamic range improvement. I hope they can somehow apply their processing to video streams and provide a wide dynamic range (maybe even HDR) video, but I'd be surprised if they can do more than provide a cellphone-like 4K stream from a single sensor.

Focus speed shouldn't be an issue. I'm guessing it's using tiny cellphone-sized camera sensors, so even at the f/2.4 printed around the lens, they'll have massive depth of field. It looks like they even have the DOF printed on each lens: 10cm-infinity for the 35mm lenses, 40cm-inf for the 70mm, and 100cm-inf for the 150mm. Any focusing will be done computationally at post-processing time.

I'm interested in the concept; I just hope they're a little more developer-friendly then Lytro turned out to be. I know there's a lot of proprietary secret sauce going on with the computational post-processing, but if they can open up their system just a bit to let the crowd in to poke around, there's probably a lot of unique creative opportunities.

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Re:The Light L16 – a multi-aperture computational camera by unicornporn on Thursday October 08, 2015 @04:43AM (#10351541)

Thanks for an excellent reply! Well, I had totally overlooked the FAQ and I see now that they are hoping to deliver DNG, and it doesn't seem to be the demosaiced linear DNG variant (which is very good). As you say it most certainly needs to be processed/exported (either in camera or in post) to DNG. If the software lives as long as the camera, that's fine by me. Many camera makers already "cook" their raws so perhaps this doesn't need to be bad.

> Any focusing will be done computationally at post-processing time.

I catch myself being stuck in old ways of thinking. Again you are right and you just threw some fuel on my excitement fire.

I must say I love the innovation that new actors are bringing to the market. However, I will remain a bit skeptical until release. A lot can happen in a year.

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