Re:Lytro Announces New Light-Field Camera Photo Features
by nrp on Friday November 16, 2012 @01:40AM
(#4792737)
This is actually not the case. I wrote a tool to pull apart the file format: https://github.com/nrpatel/lfptools
The image is stored as a raw Bayer array on the camera. The conversion to stacked JPEG occurs on the computer. The camera has a pretty beefy DSP on board to do live refocusing on the preview.
I was really disappointed when I found that out. I thought the software on the computer was to process the raw data, but I guess not.
I still might be interested, but the the form factor is odd. Worse is that since they decided to go with that shape, they had to make the screen very very tiny.
It's an interesting product, considering it's the first of it's kind on the consumer market. I hope there is a version 2, because I think it could be very interesting. If it could shoot video, that could be pretty fascinating.
Heck, tell other people how to use the format. A series of focal planes and a depth map? Seems like hackers might be able to come up with some pretty fun stuff.