The team at Lytro is completing the job of a century’s worth of theory and exploration about light fields. Lytro’s engineers and scientists have taken light fields out of the lab – miniaturizing a roomful of cameras tethered to a supercomputer and making it fit in your pocket

Richard spotted an article about this in the economist last week and I had a quick read and liked what I saw. It sounds like this isn't, yet, going to enable you to take take photos that are of a printable quality, but realistically, how many photographs get printed these days - sadly very few I suspect. What they say on the mexapixel/size issue is the following, which I don't quite understand

The amount of megapixels, or resolution, is fundamentally about how big of a 2D photograph one can print. So, when viewed on even big screen monitors, the 14 megapixel camera ends up throwing away over 90% of the pixels. In fact, the lens on most point-and-shoots have a fraction of the resolution of their sensors. With light field technology, we make use of the pixels you would traditionally throw away. We use those pixels to retain the depth information of the scene. Light field resolution provides better than HD quality today.

I like that this is a different way of using light and technology. I like that it isn't just a "replace film with sensor and operate as normal" solution, but something that has been thought about, and I'm interested to see what happens next.

But also, how many companies get to include the following sentence on their website?

Want to learn more? Check out the Lytro Blog. Want to learn a lot more? Read our CEO’s dissertation.