The plenoptic concept is making the rounds today. At least 14 people have sent me notes about it. I've been tracking this technology from the first discussions and talks about it in 2006ish, IIRC.
The idea is simple: Instead of capturing only spatial information from the incoming light, capture the vector information as well. That allows for in-process focus adjustment and more sophisticated image correction processing. It's not 3D or holography, it's more information with which to focus and render the image. The downside of this is all technical. You generally need about 10x as many photo receptors to produce a given number of finished image pixels ... so a 12 Mpixel image relies on having somewhere around 120-144 million photosites behind them to capture both spatial and vector data. Similarly, the image processing and data handling systems have to be suitably robust to handle that amount of incoming data... It's interesting, but I think that the big news is that some money is being handed to Ted Ng now to develop his prototypes into a viable production camera. The technology curve is catching up to the needs of this kind of capture and processing, so a new game in photography could happen in the near future. On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 12:44 AM, P. J. Alling <[email protected]> wrote: > Maybe someone else has posted this, but I have a bit more than 8k messages > from the PDML in my inbox, which I haven't even begun to wade trough, so > I've decided to share. Mike Johnston seems to think this is the future, but > a little bit of research on the technology left me somewhat underwhelmed, > perhaps because I was expecting some kind or real breakthrough, maybe having > to do do with holographic principals, as opposed to massively processing > different image planes. Still it's an interesting concept. > > http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2011/06/the-next-big-thing.html > > > -- > Where's the Kaboom? There was supposed to be an Earth-shattering Kaboom! > > --Marvin the Martian. > > > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > [email protected] > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and > follow the directions. > -- Godfrey godfreydigiorgi.posterous.com -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
