New camera technology: "Light Field." No more focusing required.
 

http://www.lytro.com/picture_gallery

Summary: With this camera, you don't need to adjust your focus or depth of field, because you do it on your computer after you've taken the photo. It also allows you to make 3D photos somehow with one lens and one camera. Very cool technology, but I'm wondering how expensive it's going to be.[beta]

From reading it seems mostly software based. Not sure how much of a "real" gamechanging technology it is after reading that. They are very sparse on actual information, preferring a lot of fluffy blah-blah.

Still, lets see what its actually like once its released. I am curious, but don't see it causing a revolution any time soon.

This pretty much.

How does a light field camera capture the light rays?

Recording light fields requires an innovative, entirely new kind of sensor called a light field sensor. The light field sensor captures the color, intensity and vector direction of the rays of light. This directional information is completely lost with traditional camera sensors, which simply add up all the light rays and record them as a single amount of light. This sort of photography isn't possible without software processing AND an entirely new sensor technology. It's essentially capturing all the light ray data and maintaining that data inside the image format to be adjusted later.

It's not just a nifty software package that allows you to tweak the photo in gimmicky ways. This is similar to the introduction of RAW format to digital photographers, except far more advanced.

It's supposed to be able to let you shoot photos without having to adjust aperture or focus, and you can adjust focus, depth of field, perspective, and other things post production.

Wouldn't that still require optics which are basically focused to infinity? which would mean the de-focus would be done digitally

If you guys paid a little more attention to the page that says "The Science Inside" and a subsection that says "Take a Deeper Dive", you get this, linked directly from the company's own website:
http://www.lytro.com/renng-thesis.pdf

I'm interested but only believe it when I see it.

There's enough scientific info in there to make a person's nose bleed. [thumbup]

You can't think of it in terms of current camera technology. When you take the picture, nothing is focused in a traditional sense. You're capturing huge amounts of light data from the scene, and when you put it on the computer, you're telling the software to pass that light data through a virtual lens and aperture. The end result is a photo that looks like it was taken with a traditional camera. It's kind of like manipulating a camera in a 3D rendering software, except this is using real-life data.

http://www.allmystery.de/dateien/uh3...,nosebleed.gif

great now you tell me