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Comment by Forgeties79 | Hacker News Reader

You couldn’t offload and use the refocus feature without their software and 4MP was half what smartphones were doing in 2012 (rapidly increasing above 8MP after that). Fixed lens so you couldn’t improve the image quality with glass - that’s totally understandable given the product but it is still a limitation to the visual quality.

That’s a bad recipe for casual and professional users alike. Can’t ingest into your workflow quickly, images are low res, can’t improve the image, and your smartphone was better just missing one, admittedly neat, feature. If that existed in phones people would use it like crazy I imagine.

Too narrow of a use case IMO, too many compromises for one feature, hence why it failed.

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I doubt resolution is a limiting factor LCoS (transmissive ones are lower resolution typically though, but you could build reflective) phase modulators are available in 4k resolution (and maybe even higher). And I don't know if you need that much resolution because the regions you're trying to focus are quite broad, in fact I suspect the resolution of your phase modulator would not limit resolution but the max distance between focused regions, because it would set the max phase ramp you can achieve.

Loss, i.e. equivalent aperture is a different matter and I think this would imply quite a light loss.

> I doubt resolution is a limiting factor LCoS (transmissive ones are lower resolution typically though, but you could build reflective) phase modulators are available in 4k resolution (and maybe even higher)

We’re talking about a specific camera, the lytros, which had a 4MP resolution. I’m not saying there was a limitation in the technology broadly speaking. Just that this camera was not worth it for the time. It’s sacrificed too much for one feature and at $400 it just didn’t sell

I looked into the details at the time, and as I recall the camera had lower resolution than the 4 MP of the sensor because of the microlens array. A lot was written about this at the time.

I remember a friend, who was a photography buff, was quite excited about the camera. But he didn't actually buy one.

sensor was 40MP, image was 4MP

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