For professional photographers and average consumers alike, there's nothing more frustrating than thinking you've captured the perfect shot, only to realize the end result is an out-of-focus mess. Some companies are hoping to make that disappointment a thing of the past by using a cutting-edge digital camera technology called "plenoptics".
Plenoptics technology is brand new to the camera scene, and while the Raytrix R11 will set you back a cool $30,000, a new startup named Lytro promises its device will launch with a more consumer-friendly price tag. Lytro's camera also uses a micro-array of lenses to capture your perfect shot, allowing for after-the-fact focusing.
You can think of it like having an entire army of photographers snapping the same picture, each with a slightly different focus. With that many lenses at work, your perfect shot is almost impossible to miss — you just need to find it. The camera's internals do the heavy lifting by piecing together the thousands of bits of image data, and what you're left with is a moment truly frozen in time.
To navigate through your newly captured image, both the Raytrix R11 and the Lytro offer software that works in tandem with the new camera technology, allowing you to explore the data-rich image you've captured. In the software, an on-screen slider allows you to adjust the focus, letting you save the image just as you meant to take it. By adjusting the focus away from your intended subject, you might even discover details you didn't realize you captured, or compose a lovely shot with do-it-yourself bokeh.
Though it's slated to arrive by the end of the year, there's no formal release date scheduled for the consumer-level Lytro camera. But if the company can introduce focus-shifting photography at an affordable price, it may not be long before 'Lytro' is a name uttered alongside Nikon, Canon and Kodak.
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