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Old 20-10-2011, 07:13 AM
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First commercial lightfield camera

http://www.engadget.com/2011/10/19/l...tfield-camera/

Incredibly interesting technology which seems surprisingly affordable for a world first. Good low light performance is supposedly inherent to the used technology.
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Old 20-10-2011, 07:50 AM
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Ah! Was wondering when they'd release that.

Get prepared for loads of crappy images to flood the web, haha!

Great technology, and, great to see them finally come through with the goods!

H
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Old 20-10-2011, 07:52 AM
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Ways I can see this being useful for astrohpotography is (obviously) focus problems, dispensing with coma correctors, after-the-fact correction of some aberrations and new methods of image stacking to mitigate the impact of atmospheric turbulence.
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Old 21-10-2011, 01:09 AM
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Not a bad deal for $400
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Old 21-10-2011, 04:50 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by irwjager View Post
Ways I can see this being useful for astrohpotography is (obviously) focus problems, dispensing with coma correctors, after-the-fact correction of some aberrations and new methods of image stacking to mitigate the impact of atmospheric turbulence.
This is not new technology. It's not going to help you with any of those things. Your subjects are not in the near field, they are always at the exact same focus location so far as this camera would be concerned: at infinity.
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Old 21-10-2011, 01:47 PM
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Originally Posted by frolinmod View Post
This is not new technology.
No one claimed that. It is the first commercial/consumer application though which is pretty exciting!
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It's not going to help you with any of those things. Your subjects are not in the near field, they are always at the exact same focus location so far as this camera would be concerned: at infinity.
Sorry, but I would have to disagree here.

  • Focus problems: attaining perfect focus is not a given. You will only have to take a look in the beginners section (and now and then in the Deep Space section) to see examples. It doesn't matter whether your subject is at infinity or not for this to be a very useful feature.
  • Some aberrations may be corrected after the fact because they stem from uneven focus problems, whether they be across different wavelengths (ex. chromatic aberrations) or across the image (ex. spherical aberrations)
  • I can see potential interesting benefits to stacking or otherwise analysing/correlating multiple frames of recorded directional information in addition to the usual intensity and color information for planetary (short exposure) photography. As we're all painfully aware of, wavefront perturbations introduced by the atmosphere ('seeing') change the direction of light rays (causing a blur in long exposures). These ray directions can now be recorded and, unless I'm mistaken, may be of help when trying to model (or measure) atmospheric turbulence by correlating color and intensity to direction. But then again, I may be mistaken. EDIT: Cool! Seems I'm not a completely full of it... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plenopt...ra#cite_note-8

Last edited by irwjager; 21-10-2011 at 03:19 PM.
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Old 21-10-2011, 05:35 PM
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Sorry, but I would have to disagree here.
You're talking about the general technology. I'm talking about this one specific implementation. It's not suitable. I also don't think you're going to see mass market (hence affordable) implementations that will be adaptable to the sort of functionality that will be useful in the astrophotography market segment. I could be wrong, but if I am, I'll be dead before it happens, so I won't ever know I was wrong, so I am right.
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Old 21-10-2011, 07:08 PM
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I could be wrong, but if I am, I'll be dead before it happens, so I won't ever know I was wrong, so I am right.
Can't argue with that logic!

Seriously though, if you're still interested, have a look at the CEO's thesis (from 2006). They started off with a bog standard DSLR and modified (added) it with a microlens sheet. That's basically all it is from a hardware point of view.

They put the excess in megapixels of modern CCDs to good use and trade 'intensity' resolution for 'intensity+vector' resolution. Yes, you get lower resolution images, but that's not what us astronomers are concerned with (remember a lot of planetary imagers still happily use their 0.3MP webcams).

While the hardware is nothing too revolutionary, the clever bit is in the algorithms, which, up until recently were too computationally expensive for any sort of compact on-board electronics. Again, this is something us astronomers are not concerned with, as we like to process our stacks of images off-device anyway.

Developments in software and computer algorithms happen at a lightning pace. I would've given you a blank stare if you would've talked to me about 'stacking subs' 15 years ago. I totally expect you'll be stacking light fields in another 15 from now and I definitely hope you'll still be around on IIS just so I can say 'told you so!'
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