When you all get my age, you will shrink, so will your ideas, so will
your life style.--- But it is the computer to keep you connected, it
brings the world to you and you to the world. Think of it. As long as
you can sit and use your fingers!
Marta
On Jun 23, 2011, at 9:44 AM, John Robinson wrote:
Not a bad idea Marta!!
John
On Jun 23, 2011, at 9:19 AM, Marta Edie wrote:
I only use my iphone to take pictures anymore. My conclusion to
manage anything in life : "Less is more."
Marta
On Jun 23, 2011, at 9:06 AM, John Stone wrote:
I wouldn't hold your breathe waiting for this....
On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 8:58 AM, John Robinson <[email protected]
> wrote:
This article isn't about Mac's but I bet we use it on our Mac.
Enough of us in the group seem to be into this topic I though you
might like to see what is soon to be available.
John
A Start-Up’s Camera Lets You Take Shots First and Focus Later
<nyt_logo_106x27.gif>
STEVE LOHR, On Wednesday June 22, 2011, 12:35 am EDT
With an innovative camera due out later this year from a company
called Lytro, photographers will have one less excuse for having
missed that perfect shot.
The company’s technology allows a picture’s focus to be adjusted
after it is taken. While viewing a picture taken with a Lytro
camera on a computer screen, you can, for example, click to bring
people in the foreground into sharp relief, or switch the focus to
the mountains behind them.
But is Lytro’s technology just a neat feature, or is it the next
big thing in cameras?
The founding team of the Silicon Valley start-up and investors who
have put in $50 million are betting on the latter. The technology
has won praise from computer scientists and raves from early users
of its prototype camera.
“We see technology companies all the time, but it’s rare that
someone comes along with something that is this much of a
breakthrough,” said Ben Horowitz, co-founder of Andreessen
Horowitz, a major investor in Lytro. “It’s superexciting.”
Lytro’s founder and chief executive is Ren Ng, 31. His
achievement, experts say, has been to take research projects of
recent years — requiring perhaps 100 digital cameras lashed to a
supercomputer — and squeeze that technology into a camera headed
for the consumer market later this year.
Mr. Ng explained the concept in 2006 in his Ph.D. thesis at
Stanford University, which won the worldwide competition for the
best doctoral dissertation in computer science that year from the
Association for Computing Machinery. Since then Mr. Ng has been
trying to translate the idea into a product that can be brought to
market — and building a team of people to do it.
The Lytro camera captures far more light data, from many angles,
than is possible with a conventional camera. It accomplishes that
with a special sensor called a microlens array, which puts the
equivalent of many lenses into a small space. “That is the heart
of the breakthrough,” said Pat Hanrahan, a Stanford professor, who
was Mr. Ng’s thesis adviser but is not involved in Lytro.
But the wealth of raw light data comes to life only with
sophisticated software that lets a viewer switch points of focus.
This allows still photographs to be explored as never before.
“They become interactive, living pictures,” Mr. Ng said. He thinks
a popular use may be families and friends roaming through
different perspectives on pictures of, say, vacations and parties
posted on Facebook (Lytro will have a Facebook app).
For a photographer, whether amateur or professional, the Lytro
technology means that the headaches of focusing a shot go away.
Richard Koci Hernandez, a photojournalist, said that when he tried
out a prototype earlier this year, he immediately recognized the
potential impact.
“You just concentrate on the image and composition, but there’s no
need to worry about focus anymore,” Mr. Hernandez said. “That’s
something you do later.”
“That was the aha! moment for me,” said Mr. Hernandez, an
assistant professor of new media at the graduate school of
journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. “This is
game-changing.”
Mr. Hernandez, who is not affiliated with Lytro, was one of
several photographers who tested prototypes. His model, he said,
was sheathed in a black plastic shell, so he did not see its
design. But he said it was the size of a standard point-and-shoot
camera. The picture resolution, he added, was indistinguishable
from that of his other point-and-shoots, a Canon and a Nikon.
Eliminating any loss of resolution in a camera like Lytro’s, which
is capturing light data from many angles, is a real advance, said
Shree Nayar, a professor at Columbia University and an expert in
computer vision. Mr. Nayar is familiar with Mr. Ng’s work, but he
said he had not seen anything Lytro has done in more than a year.
“If they have been able to recover most of the lost resolution,
then their image refocusing application is a very cool feature,”
Mr. Nayar said. “But it is an open question how popular it becomes.”
At Lytro, the view is that the technology, once it gets into
people’s hands, opens the door to many possible new features and
uses. Among its other advantages, the new camera is much faster
than conventional ones because there is no “shutter lag” — waiting
for the autofocus device to work and the shot to be taken. Those
fractions of a second, of course, are often when the dog darts off
or the child’s smile becomes a frown.
Lytro cameras can also capture plenty of data for 3-D images,
which can be viewed on a computer screen with 3-D glasses.
Lytro is not saying what the price of its first camera will be,
but insists it will be for the consumer market, which suggests a
price of a few hundred dollars. The company is also not being more
precise about when the camera will ship. It will initially be sold
through online retailers like Amazon.com and Lytro’s Web site.
But to gear up, the company is rapidly adding to its 45-person
staff in Mountain View, Calif. Its recruits include veterans of
Microsoft, Google, Apple, Intel and Sun Microsystems.
One Lytro convert who caught the attention of the Valley digerati
was Kurt Akeley, who joined the company last September from
Microsoft Research. Mr. Akeley, 53, was one of the early engineers
at Silicon Graphics, a pioneer in computer graphics, and is one of
the lead developers of OpenGL, a popular set of graphics
programming tools.
Mr. Akeley, a consulting professor at Stanford, was familiar with
Mr. Ng’s work and said he was lured by the challenge and technical
opportunity. Lytro, Mr. Akeley said, has “a powerful technology
with legs — great things can happen.”
Lytro chose to design and market a camera itself, instead of
licensing its technology to a camera giant like Canon or Nikon. It
will farm out the manufacturing to a company in Taiwan, but it
wanted to control the details of the camera itself — much as Apple
does.
“We can just make a better product this way, and really show what
we can do,” Mr. Ng said. “The big camera makers are mostly
polishing existing technology, and we didn’t want to do this in an
incremental way.”
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temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety -Benjamin
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