I think the light-field technology is fascinating, and potentially very useful. I'm completely croggled by what seem to be their product and marketing ideas -- they're crazy. The camera design they're showing, and the focus on Facebook for display, are not what you'd do for a specialist technical tool; so I infer that they really are trying for a consumer mass-market success. In the consumer mass-market for photography, the separate digicam is being strongly squeezed by the cell-phone. Post-processing is out of the picture, and few people have Macintosh computers. What people want is a picture taken when they push the button (instead of half a second later) in which everything is clearly visible (including sharp). So, what Lytro seems to be offering is a camera that specializes in making most of the picture un-sharp, and which requires post-processing on a Macintosh. This kind of disconnect from market reality does not seem promising. They do, in their text, make some claim for their camera eliminating annoying delays in conventional cameras, so they do seem to be thinking at least partially the same direction I am. But it's very easy to read their web site as being all about the gimmick of the user selecting what's sharp in the photo, and that's not going to sell very many cameras; that's a "shiny" techno-toy, not a useful camera. -- David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b@xxxxxxxx; http://dd-b.net/ Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/ Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/ Dragaera: http://dragaera.info
