The Light Field Camera – gimmick or a photographic breakthrough?

If you’re at all interested in photography, you’ve either heard about the light field camera or you will soon – even if you don’t read about it here. 🙂 To see it’s biggest “wow!” feature, click once anywhere on the photo below [Edit: sorry, the “live” image is gone 🙁 ] to change the focus to that point, and click twice to enlarge it. That’s why it’s called a “living picture” – just shoot an image, and decide later exactly how you want it to look.

As well as the point of focus, you can change depth of field, too. But is this a real photographic breakthrough, or is it just a gimmick? Go to Lytro.com [now Raytrix], read the material, play with the test images, and decide for yourself.

The price of the light field camera when it’s released is so far only said to be “competitive” – whatever that means when you’re off in new territory! I won’t guess whether that means $500 or $2,000 – or a lot more, competitive with some highly advanced cameras.