Saturday, May 5, 2012

Introducing Lytro

Date:  May 4, 2012

Today, my new toy arrived.

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I have pre-order this gadget since January this year.  It took them 4 months plus to manufactured it, and finalized the design, and ship it.

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OK.  The unboxing feeling is like opening an Apple product.  Even this is very "green", made from recycle film.

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Here is the box.  Very elegantm, zen and simple.

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No wonder even Steve Jobs also interested to talk to Lytro, and wanted to see if it is possible to integrate this fantastic technology into the iPhone and iPad.

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This is still the box.  The other side.

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OK.  This is interesting.  It comes with grey and blue color, 16GB or 8GB model.  Simple on-the-box info.

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Very zen packing.  Simple and elegant.

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The size of the camera is surprisingly slightly larger than what I imagin to be.  The lenses looks deep and complicated.

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This is the touch screen LCD display on the other side.  See this is what happen when you take this photo with iPhone or other camera.  You thought you have focus on the Lytro, but, the photo turn out to be focus on other things, such as keyboard, etc.  So, it makes your Lytro blur out of focus.  Later I will explain what Lytro does.

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The body of the camera.

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The LCD display screen, although is small, but it is touch screen.  Tap or double Tap.  Slide up, left and right or down.  Cool.

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Very simple manual.  Show you what is each button for, show you how to swipe up to show the menu.  Then, simple take picture by pressing down the shutter button.

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Then, after you took the picture, you can look at your picture, zoom it, and refocus it.  They also teach you and explain the main feature of the camera, by composing what they so called a "living picture".

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Turn the manual over, teach you refocus, how to install software.  I like #10, as it showed only a Macbook there.  Cool.

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Very simple and elegant manual.  I like it.

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This Lytro camera is the first Light Field Camera in the world.  It capture everything - instantly.  So, you need not to worry about the focusing.  You can refocus the photo later.

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The capability of refocusing later is their main Lytro feature.

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To learn more about Lytro... https://www.lytro.com, now, let's look at some of the photo I took.

Photo #1

I took this photo, with my son, Jay Jay behind some plants.  So, when you view this photo in the photo viewer that comes with it, you can do the refocusing anything on any subject in the photo.

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Now, as you can see, I moved my mouse cursor to Jay Jay's head, and click.  It instantly refocus the photo, and the leaf become blur out of focus.

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Photo #2

Mr. Yoda and the Crayon.  This is focus on Mr. Yoda.

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Now, I focus on the Crayon.  Mr. Yoda is now blur out of focus.

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Now I focus on the black Boggle Flash box.  And both Mr. Yoda and Crayon is out of focus.  And I only took one photo.  Very cool, isn't it?

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Here is the cross sectional diagram.  I was right!  Many lenses inside.

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The technology inside the camera.

#1.  All camera needs light.

#2.  Conventional camera cannot record the light field.

#3.  You need a new light field sensor to record the light field.

#4.  It records the color, the intensity, the vector direction of the rays of light.

 

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It is truely amazing.  it allow both the picture taker and the the viewer to focus pictures after they are snapped.

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I was joking with one of my high school friend yesterday, as with Lytro you can do the following.

Photo #3 (A Photo taken from the Lytro website Photo Gallery)

Use the Lytro to take the photo of a group of girls as quick as possible.  And then, review it later.

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Focus on second girl.

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Focus on the third girl.

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Focus on the fourth girl.  With this you can see every face clearly after you took the picture.  :)

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Now, about the software.  Very simple interface.  It shows all your photo.  Or if you have make a favorite from the camera, you can filter it to the favorite.

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Click on the photo, you can refocus here and there.  It shows you the photo info too.

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And you can share it on Facebook.

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Those who wish to find out more about this Lytro camera, you can find it from the blog.

http://blog.lytro.com/

If you want to buy, you need to buy it from the website.  Take note, they only ship it to US for now.  And you need to have a Mac to import and edit the pictures.  So, if you don't have, you need to buy an iMac or Macbook.  And it appears that they still have stocks??

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Not really.  They will ship in June or July.  So, there is a manufacturing time, just like Apple.  Cool.

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I think I use a Singapore credit card to buy, and ask them to ship to my Borderlinx address in Singapore.  Borderlinx is corlaborating with Citibank.  So it directly charge to your Citibank card.  Just in case, if they do not accept credit card with Singapore address, then, just ask the Borderlinx Concierge to order for you.

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So, the shipping cost is about SGD$28.84 which is quite cheap to ship it back.

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OK.  I am going to play with this today when I go out.  :)

One last thing... It currently have a plugin to embed the photo in wordpress blog.  That is why I cannot embed it in here yet.  But I will figure out a way.  haha

 

 

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