© Lytro

Since it’s made its web debut late last year, Lytro has been mak­ing rounds on the web as the next gen­er­a­tion game-changing cam­era. Earlier this week, they finally intro­duced their first line of con­sumer cam­era, also called Lytro, and gave a demo at the AsiaD con­fer­ence.

Lytro reads not just the light, but also the three-dimensional infor­ma­tion and records it as raw data on their 8 megaray¹ sen­sor as a light field construct.

After you down­load the data via their pro­pri­etary soft­ware², you can then explore the depth-of-field of the image, the same way you would focus a scene with your reg­u­lar cam­era, only this one hap­pens after you take the shots.

Light field pho­tog­ra­phy isn’t new. Engineers and sci­en­tists have played with this in labs for years, per­haps in the last one or two decade, but Lytro is the first one to bring this to the con­sumer market.

Though it is a sci­en­tific break­through, I don’t see Lytro as a dis­rup­tive con­sumer product.

Digital pho­tog­ra­phy takes the niché ori­gin of this art form to an unprece­dented mass. it takes the image from print and gal­leries to the now-ubiquitous screens. You take a pic­ture, share it and every­one can see it with­out installing any new plu­g­ins, soft­ware or viewer. It is instant, sim­ple and easy.

Lytro, on the other hand is an entirely new dimen­sion. It is more com­plex and the prod­uct it presents has much more infor­ma­tion that requires a level of com­plex­ion that dis­tort pho­tog­ra­phy as we know it.

At the time of this writ­ing, lytro-captured images require a Mac with the Lytro desk­top soft­ware installed to be processed and viewed. And there’s no final state of the image as each and every one of them is refocus-able. Such state of indef­i­nite­ness serves a dif­fer­ent pur­pose and a dif­fer­ent kind of audience.

On the other hand, the bold new design of this Lytro cam­era raises the ques­tion of prac­ti­cal­ity and usability.

Let’s pre­tend that you have read the man­ual, and some­one at the shop has given you a quick les­son to use the cam­era. How usable is the touch-based oper­a­tion on the field? Is it oper­a­ble with a sweaty palm? Or with a glove on? Will some­one be able to use it when you ask a stranger to take your photo with it?

This kind of over-simplification sort of beats the pur­pose of a cam­era. The com­pany seems too eager to cash-in the way Apple does with the iPhone and the iPad. The con­sumer mar­ket is very attrac­tive, but they are also a very volatile, unpre­dictable as an entry point for ground­break­ing sci­en­tific inven­tions. But what if this whole Lytro-thing is more suit­able for the professionals?

Think arche­ol­ogy, sci­ence, med­ical, film­mak­ing, inves­tiga­tive research, or any field that requires a time-proof record­ing of infor­ma­tions. Imagine lytro-endoscopy, where a doc­tor takes one image and study every part of our inges­tion organ one click at a time with­out hav­ing the endo­scope dive to every part of it. Imagine where an archae­ol­o­gist takes one pic­ture and study all sur­face of their research with­out hav­ing him/her take mul­ti­ple images of a sin­gle scene. Imagine police cam­eras where they don’t need image-enhancing soft­ware to see the license plate of a car of a crime scene snap­shot? Imagine shoot­ing a movie where we no longer need to fol­low focus but have it done in post-production.

Nonetheless, it’s an excit­ing new tech­nol­ogy. Lytro opens up a new world of pho­tog­ra­phy that would open up people’s imag­i­na­tion. And imag­i­na­tion is a pow­er­ful force that bring us the impossible.

It is just the beginning.