Hacker News Reader

Nice to see old Lytro hardware brought back to life.

When they were launching the company, I was so excited about the possibilities. Maybe naively, I was really rooting for being able to take a photo, and then in their software (and later in Lightroom) be able to slide/brush-in/out points of focus. Alas, all we got were these gimmicky square pictures that you could click to bring various parts to focus.

View on HN

As always, a company makes a very interesting piece of hardware available but locks it down with proprietary software so when it dies almost nobody can keep using it effectively.

At least these project of reverse engineering the file format or even the firmware can bring new life to these quirky cameras

Yeah, I think the concept is cool from a physics standpoint and the software didn't do it justice. If it had launched after iPhone shipped Portrait mode I think it might have angled more in that direction. My sense is that it came to market too early.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com