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Comment by sbierwagen | Hacker News Reader

Hmm, they don't mention image size on the details page. So lets guess at it ourselves.

The viewable area of the flash widget is 540x540. You can zoom in 2x. There's plenty of sensor artefacting at that zoom, (even in these carefully chosen press-kit photos, which is worrying) so lets assume it's 1:1... which makes the image size 1080x1080. 1.16 megapixels, for $400? Ouch. For that much money, two ounces more weight, and a much more conventional form factor, you can get a DMC-LX5, which is probably the best single-lens digital camera on the market. (Full disclosure: I bought a LX3 with my own money back in 2009)

Poking around with Chrome's network tools will tell you that the LFP file is between 900 and 1100 kilobytes, about four times bigger than a JPEG of the same dimensions.

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No you're totally missing the point. This is holographic photography. Capturing the entire light field means this captures depth. I'm surprised they're not touting this on the web site -- there are already 3D displays. Perhaps they don't have the processing technology yet?

Edit: Yup here it is: http://blog.lytro.com/news/it-gets-better-lytro-3d-demo/ They can do more though; with a proper holographic display you could actually focus on different parts of the image (with your eyes) and "see around" objects to a limited extent. (Their field-of-view-to-depth-of-field ratio is limited by the size of the lens though.)

> This is holographic photography. Capturing the entire light field means this captures depth.

So can we reconstruct 3D image data if Lytro record some kind of RAW data?

Yes! They do in the demo I linked in my edit.

If you examine the .lfp file, it shows that it stores a set of 1080x1080 JPEGs representing different images planes in the light field along with their depths. There is also a 25x25 look up table of the depth levels of the image, presumably to enable a UI in which the user clicks on a portion of the image and the nearest JPEG plane is displayed. Note that some of the older images in their gallery are at lower resolutions like 831x831.

This is just their fairly simple compressed format for web display. I imagine the camera itself is storing much more interesting information in its ~20 megabyte files, though perhaps also ultimately for 1080x1080 2D display.

actually the LFP file will be around 20 megabytes on the camera. After processing and encoding it'll probably be much smaller, since it can throw away garbage data and redundant image slices. But megapixels aren't really the right metric anyway.

And the LX5 is good but for my money I'd want a P5000 or XZ-1.

FWIW I have an XZ-1 and it's the single greatest (compact) camera I've ever owned. I can't talk highly enough of it. I sold my 50D w/ 24-105mm f4/L to trade down to something I can daily-carry and while it obviously doesn't completely compete with the SLR, it hasn't left me "wanting" at all.

The XZ-1 looks good, but there's no viewfinder. As a DSLR user who looks to switch to a smaller camera, I'm just not going back to the camera-at-arm's-length-to-view-the-back-LCD thing to take my photos.

The Fuji X100 is the only large-sensor prosumer camera that has a built-in viewfinder (attachable viewfinder is out of the question as it doesn't give you a true enough preview), and so it's the only one I'd be willing to switch to. Come to think of it, the new Sony NEX-5N has an electronic viewfinder that might work, actually.

The XZ-1 has an optional electronic viewfinder as well.

An attachable electronic viewfinder might work, but then you can't use an external flash together with the viewfinder. Plus, it's just one more accessory you have to buy and carry around with you. Pretty stupid.

The german Raytrix lightfield cameras* have ~1/4 effective resolution. If the Lytro is comparable, then its "11 Megarays" could mean about 2.75 Megapixel.

* http://www.raytrix.de/index.php/RX_en.html

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