Light field camera start-up company Lytro will introduce its much talked-about Light Field Camera to the stores, the company announced on Tuesday.
The light field camera encompasses groundbreaking technology that lets users adjust the focus after clicking the picture.
While most conventional cameras capture a single plane of light, the Lytro camera captures the entire light field. It makes use of "light field technology," which allows the focal point of a digital image to be changed after the photo is taken. Lytro calls this feature "shoot now, focus later."
Lytro is the creation of Ren Ng, a light-field photography researcher at Stanford University.
The cameras are telescope-shaped and come in three colors - Red Hot, Graphite and Electric Blue. There is a 16GB and an 8GB model. The camera has an 8X optical zoom lens with a constant f/2 aperture. It does not have an auto-focus motor, which means you can shoot pictures instantly without any shutter delay. The camera weighs less than eight ounces. It has an interactive multi-touch screen with back-lit LCD display. Users can easily share pictures from any device to Twitter, Facebook or blogs.
The pictures produced are HD-quality, capturing "living pictures" instantly, claims Lytro.
The company's site said the camera will be available at Target, BestBuy and Amazon, starting October. It will also go on sale in Australia, Canada, Hong Kong and Singapore.
The 8GB camera is prized at $399 and the 16GB camera costs $499.
"Since introducing the Lytro camera just six months ago, nearly 400,000 light field pictures have been shared on Lytro.com. We are excited to take this picture revolution one step further by making Lytro available to more photographers in the U.S. and around the world," Charles Chi, CEO of Lytro, said in a statement, as reported by PC Magazine.
The company won the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal's Idea and Innovation Award in the consumer technology category this year.
