360Photography

Startup company Lytro is claiming to be close to launching a camera that allows any point of focus to be specified after the shot is taken. The concept behind the device, called a light-field, or plenoptic camera camera has surfaced regularly over the past few years, but now Lytro, founded by Stanford PhD Ren Ng, says it will have a product ready within a year. The concept uses a series of microlenses to split the incoming light rays across multiple sensor pixels, depending on the angle from which it arrived. This additional information about the angle of the arriving light makes it possible to recalculate different focus points after the image has been shot, but at the cost of lower image resolution. The company hasn’t, as yet, provided details such as its system’s output resolution. (From the New York Times)
News: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)