Lytro review

The Lytro light-field camera is different to most of the products we review here at PC Pro. Most are refinements of an existing idea – laptops with faster processors, tablets with higher-resolution displays, cameras with better low-light handling.

The Lytro, however, represents a huge leap forward, and introduces a completely new technology for capturing images: a new type of sensor called the “light-field” sensor, which is capable of snapping photos not only in a flat plane, with one point of focus, but at multiple focal lengths simultaneously, allowing the photographer to change the focus point after a picture has been taken.

With a standard camera, if you’ve focused on the wrong point by accident, there’s nothing you can do to rescue it; with the Lytro, once you’ve imported your images into the Lytro desktop software, you simply click the area you want to bring into focus, and it’s sharp as a tack.

Click anywhere in the frame above to refocus the image. To see the perspective shift effect in action, click and hold, then move your mouse around.

The desktop software also allows you to convert photographs after they’ve been imported to give a perspective shift view, whereby the whole photo remains in focus. We’ve embedded a shot above so you can see it in action. We’ve used code provided by the Lytro website, where images can be posted, viewed and shared in their full glory.

This is seriously clever technology, and it works by dint of an extra layer of microlenses, placed in front of a standard CMOS, which allow the camera to measure not only the intensity of light, but also the angle of incidence of the light rays hitting the microlenses. The camera uses this extra information to work out where the light would have fallen had the camera been focused on a different point.

From a technological standpoint it’s a thrilling development. And in the Lytro it works astonishingly well. In the camera’s default Everyday mode, you can simply point and shoot without having to worry about focus. It doesn’t give you unlimited depth of field, however – according to a Lytro spokesperson, it’s the equivalent of setting a compact camera to f/20.

The hidden advantage of light-field photography is that the Lytro’s aperture of f/2 remains wide open when shooting, all the way through the camera’s 8x optical zoom range, delivering impressive light-gathering capabilities, plus the ability to blur the foreground and background smoothly when focusing on different points.

There’s a manual mode for those who want to be creative, allowing the adjustment of sensitivity between ISO 80 and 3200, and the shutter speed between 1/250sec and 8sec. You can set the focus point as well, with a tap to the rear touchscreen, and coupled with the camera’s ability to focus at a millimetre away from the lens, it’s possible to produce dramatic macro images.

Can we recommend the Lytro as a replacement for your current snapper? Although it’s fun to use at first, the answer has to be no. The biggest problem is that the images are very low resolution: the desktop software and web galleries display images in a small box in the centre of your screen; they can be zoomed, but can’t be viewed full-screen. Another potential hurdle is the Windows software is 64-bit only.

Even the accompanying iOS app, which allows you to view images interactively, can’t show the images full-screen. Handily, you can transfer images direct to your phone via the Lytro’s built-in Wi-Fi chip. It’s possible to export images as JPEG files, which gives you a larger photo, but images are still only 1,080 x 1,080 in size (1.2 megapixels) and can no longer be refocused once exported.

The other issue is the hardware itself. Physically, the Lytro is like no other camera you’ll have used – not in a good way. It takes the form of an extended square tube with a lens at one end and a tiny 1.5in, 128 x 128 touchscreen at the other. The shutter release is on the top of this tube with a touch-sensitive zoom track behind it; on the bottom is a power button and a micro-USB socket for charging and data transfer. Irritatingly, there’s no tripod thread, although one can be added via a slide-on collar (£20 inc VAT).

To put it bluntly, it’s an awkward device to use. The screen has dreadful viewing angles, so you have to look at it directly head-on to frame your picture, and it’s horribly dim. In bright sunlight we had a tough time seeing anything at all on it.

The form factor makes it impossible to get a comfortable one-handed grip without cramping our fingers up, and it’s tricky to frame photos accurately, with a level horizon. This is important, as the desktop software allows no cropping or rotation.

Finally, the fact that the camera uses a compact-camera-sized sensor, which already imparts a naturally long depth of field, means you have to try quite hard to produce the sort of attractive shifts in focus of which the technology is capable. We found it worked best with close-up subjects.

We can see light-field technology making its way into all sorts of cameras over the next few years, from smartphones right the way up to serious DSLRs, with dramatic consequences for the way we view and carry out digital photography. However, don’t imagine for one moment that your first light-field camera should be a Lytro. It’s a toy, no more, no less – and with the 8GB model costing £400, it’s an expensive one at that.

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