Re:Sources: Google is buying Lytro for about $40M
by majormajor on Wednesday March 21, 2018 @12:16PM
(#16639515)
How well did it work for action?
That's where I find myself always hating autofocus (even on a fancy camera with focus tracking and motion detection and such).
Re:Sources: Google is buying Lytro for about $40M
by giobox on Wednesday March 21, 2018 @02:35PM
(#16641067)
How recent is your experience with "traditional" phase detect/contrast AF? There's been some ridiculously good improvements even in the past 12 months in cameras like the Nikon D850/Sony A7 XXX, to the point where fancy "lightfield" style setting focus in post like the Lytro is way lower on my personal wishlist than it once was. The eye detect AF in the Sonys is frankly superb when working with extremely shallow DoF. This stuff typically filters down range to cheaper models really quickly as well.
Re:Sources: Google is buying Lytro for about $40M
by majormajor on Wednesday March 21, 2018 @05:23PM
(#16642554)
It's a recent camera but not top of the line (Fuji X-T2).
My problem is more that with animals, it's hard to make sure it's picked up the head vs the shoulders, say, and with shallow DOF that can ruin the shot. But then, I don't have eye detection, so maybe that would do the trick. :)
Re:Sources: Google is buying Lytro for about $40M
by bunderbunder on Wednesday March 21, 2018 @12:51PM
(#16639942)
The v1, at least, wasn't great for action. It has 10 focal planes, but they cover a fairly small range of distances, so it still needed an autofocus to get the range of focal lengths to be centered on the subject. And that autofocus was pretty slow, even slower than what I'm used to on an SLR.
I'd assume the Illum (which I've never had a chance to play with) would be way better on that front.
They absolutely tried hard, but I feel like they missed out on doing the one thing that might have really let the product take off: Releasing APIs (or at least protocol specs) for interacting with the camera over USB and wifi, and releasing a spec for their file format.
That might have given them a chance to really take off in the DIY and hobbyist market. After unboxing mine, I pretty much immediately wanted to use it to do the sorts of things that Google seems to want to do it. But without an easy way to dig into it, I lost interest pretty quickly.
Taking off my hacker hat and putting on my consumer hat, it just wasn't going to take off. My cell phone is even more portable, takes higher resolution images, and makes sharing them much easier. Getting to refocus after the fact wasn't that great a trick, because my cell phone camera already does such a good job at autofocusing.
Taking that one off and putting on my hobby photographer hat, same thing. Decades of taking pictures has left me with enough of a sense for where I want to put the focal point and what I want to do with the bokeh that I'd just as soon do it when I'm taking the picture. There was some initial fun of playing with a new toy, but ultimately I realized that doing it after the fact took what has historically been one of my favorite parts of photography and turned it into just another editing chore. That, and, even when I'm not 100% sure what I want to do with the focus at the time I'm taking the photo, my mirrorless's burst mode can accomplish essentially the same thing.
But if I could have strapped that sucker onto a robot and played with using it for 3D scene reconstruction or something. . . that would have been fun.