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Comment by dannyw | Hacker News Reader

The camera and software was also a buggy mess:

- the camera itself crashes about once every couple of minutes, and that is not an exaggeration. You literally need to keep putting the battery out and back in, and that is not isolated: every reviewer also mentions the same.

- the software generates a depth map from the light-field image. This depth map is often generated wrong, with blotches of foreground content being treated as the background, and vice versa. You have to manually export the depthmap as a grayscale image, fix it up in Photoshop, and import it back.

- when you share the image on lytro.com, it compresses this image and breaks it up into a few layers (presumably for the JS viewer), which significantly degrades the quality of the image

- the perspective effect isn't real, and uses content aware fill. This means that there are serious visual artefacts with this feature.

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The two cameras I have, original and Illium were pretty stable. Very slow but I didn’t experience any crashing whatsoever.

Ultimately Lytro will be a footnote in camera history. We’re already seeing scaled back implementations in SLRs and smart phones.

Just wondering, which DSLR in particular?

The Canon 5D mk IV has what’s called Dual Pixel RAW. Here’s a video.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HcQ9MSRRvn4

DPRAW doesn't use a light field, it's a stereo image.

it's not a DSLR, but some recent Panasonic mirrorless cameras have this https://www.panasonic.com/global/consumer/lumix/feature/post...

This isn’t really all that comparable to the Lytro - this is effectively a hack that takes advantage of some Panasonic camera’s ability to shoot 4K jpeg bursts at 30FPS - it racks the focus as it shoots a burst so you can pick from a range of focus points. The subject can still move noticeably in between shots, it’s not a single shot style solution like the Lytro has. I have a Panasonic m43 camera with this feature and almost never use it, It’s just a fast implementation of focus bracketing and you take a pretty big resolution/quality hit.

The new “Dual Pixel AF” sensors in some newer Canon DSLRs is much more like the Lytro, in that focus can be adjusted slightly in a single image capture, no burst capture trickery.

Yes, it's just focus-bracketing and that's as close as any non-Lytro cameras come to the Lytro feature as far as I'm aware

Reading a description of the Canon Dual-Pixel sensor feature https://www.canon.co.uk/cameras/eos-5d-mark-iv/dual-pixel-ra... ...it does not seem that it allows to adjust focus after the fact. It's something different again from Lytro and focus-bracketing.

As far as I can tell what it does is to capture depth information into the RAW file. I don't see how it could allow refocusing, but the examples show it allows you to selectively mask areas of the image based on distance from camera.

So you can sharpen 'just the eyes' if you slightly missed focus on them. Or selectively blur the front/back out of focus areas to get a stronger bokeh effect.

Yeah which dslr has this capability?

It’s not _exactly_ the same as how the Lytro worked, but you can achieve a small degree of fixing focus in post with the data captured on any of Canon’s newish “Dual Pixel AF” sensors that are increasingly found in their DSLRs. The technique is not a million miles away from what lytro did, in that there are effectively two photosites at each pixel measuring the light hitting it at slightly different angles, which is what gives the ability to fix minor focus issues in Canon’s own RAW processor. The feature isn’t supported that widely in third party RAW converters yet though.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/photographylife.com/what-is-dua...

It’d be interesting to see an implementation with time-of-flight, the precision of surface mapping could only go up. Even combining an SLR improves resolution [ https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/192f/708e0470744667f8fc5f41... ]

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