new camera crazy focus ability

[spudgunman]

check this out
http://www.digitaltrends.com/photograph ... y-forever/

make sure you click on the photos about half way down the page

[nwbobber]

That would make 90% of my UW photos a lot more interesting.

[eliseaboo]

This is nuts...wow, this capability would make my photos better...and at the same time less impressive...know what I mean?

[lundysd]

Cool stuff -- Eric Cheng (of underwater photography fame) is associated with this project, so hopefully we will have some manufacturer interest in getting these underwater soon

[Matt S.]

In another forum someone posted some of the math for that sort of camera and pointed out that you need a crapload more pixels to record all the data at all the apertures you are interested in... So a camera that offers this feature is going to slash the effective megapixel count.

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read. ... e=37751139

I am not putting in the effort to research the optics and math myself, but the poster makes sense, right? In the end, we are talking about capturing a lot more data.

[Tangfish]

This project looks super promising. At the very least, it will give Canon and Nikon a kick in the pants to innovate beyond incremental upgrades that keep them neck-and-neck. This technology could be a giant leap forward for digital photography. W00t!

[dphershman]

Interesting technology, but my reaction at this point is to say that it looks like a solution looking for a problem.

Yes, you can shift the focus point around in an image but it doesn't actually change the effective depth of field of the image. (The background can be brought into focus or the foreground, but not both). If greater depth of field is what you want there's already a proven technology to achieve this..... the aperture setting on the lens.

Some argument might be made that it will help with images where the focus plane is off some degree, (as in 'gee I wish that front Rhinophore was sharper') but as was pointed out by Matt, there's a tradeoff in pixel count with this technology. So we'll have to see if this really pans out as a feature that consumers think is valuable enough to sacrifice some image quality for.

[eliseaboo]

If you look through their website they plan to have a feature to put the whole image in focus. I'm not sure how it's done, but if the price isn't ridiculous when they finally come out I might pick one up. My biggest concern is that there is no housing for it!

[dphershman]

If you look through their website they plan to have a feature to put the whole image in focus. I'm not sure how it's done, but if the price isn't ridiculous when they finally come out I might pick one up. My biggest concern is that there is no housing for it!

Theoretically an infinite dof is possible, but the size of the data stream and subsequent processing load would be ginormous, such that it would never be practical. A lens is a well proven technology for straightening light to form a real image, there's a reason why we all have a lens in our eyeballs. Getting rid of a lens for an algorithmic sorting of light seems to be a pretty high processing load for our cameras and our visual cortex. Famous last words I'm sure, so we'll see. :-)