The Invention That Could Save Cameras
Every once in a while a story comes along that seems as likely as cats and dogs playing poker. Last week the Wall Street Journal ran an article suggesting that Kodak was on the brink of bankruptcy. That’s right, Kodak, the company once so iconic it was able to equate its brand with stopping time, aka the “Kodak moment.”
It’s not like Kodak slept through the digital revolution. Heck, one of its engineers invented digital photography in 1975, although back then they called it “film-less photography.” By 2005, Kodak was the top-selling digital camera brand in the U.S.
No, this is a case of death by smartphone. According to the latest estimate from Samsung, 2.5 billion people-that’s a third of the world’s population-now have digital cameras and most are in cell phones. Last year more than one out of every four photos taken in America was with a smartphone. And by last summer-less than a year after its launch-the iPhone 4S was the most popular camera for uploading photos on Flickr.
So if a digital camera that’s not a cell phone hopes to survive these days, it better be able to do some pretty snazzy techno-voodoo. Enter the Lytro. Not only does it do away with the whole matter of focusing a shot, but it also turns photos into playthings.
Allow me to explain. Shaped like a stick of butter, the Lytro deals with light in a truly innovative way. It captures far more data-including the light’s direction and angles-than a conventional camera, all of which is stored in the photo. The result is that there’s not just one version of an image, but many. Each person who views it can shift the focus, creating a different picture. In short, your photos on Facebook or Flickr or wherever else you want to post them, become truly interactive.
This sounds very cool, although given the quality of most Facebook photos, your choice would often come down to shifting the focus from this head to that head. Still, the notion of what inventor Ren Ng calls “living pictures” could dramatically change how we try to capture images, knowing that within each photo there can be way more than meets the eye.