'Click first, focus later' Lytro cameras now available in India

Camera buffs, rejoice! Lytro Camera has finally made its way to India in an official capacity. The first consumer camera that records entire light fields will be available in India through certain online retailers. The Lytro 11-Megaray Light Field camera is available in 8 and 16GB variants. The 8GB version is available for around Rs. 39,999 while the 16GB version is available for Rs. 47,999 from SnapDeal, whereas on Price Deals India, it's listed at Rs 34,416 with no specifcs on the capacity of the model. The 8GB version comes in colour variants of Electric Blue or Graphite while the 16GB version is available in a 'Red Hot' option only.

Lytro Cameras are known for being able to create images that take in rays of light travelling in all directions through a scene, instead of creating a flat 2D image. Once the light field has been captured entirely, users can endlessly refocus pictures, even after they have been snapped.

Lytro is in fact known for its refocus technology than anything else. The refocus technology allows users to ‘play’ around with the images, once they’re clicked on the computer screen. This activity gives the user the power to set any section, or object in a given image as the focus point of the image. With Lytro’s newest light field capability, Perspective Shift, one can also interactively change their point of view in a picture after having captured the shot.

Since the camera has to capture light data from various possible angles, unlike the conventional cameras, it comes packed with microlens array. The microlens array is a special sensor, which essentially is putting together many lenses in a tiny space.

The second stage of the Lytro camera’s work comes when the image is viewed on a computer screen. Herein, high-end software allows users to set his point of focus, thereby adding life to still images, quite literally. Those who tested the prototype of this camera touted this as the revolutionary moment in photography.

The Lytro camera was the brainchild of Ren Ng, who’s also currently the Chief Executive at Lytro. He had worked on this concept since 2006 as a part of his Ph.D. thesis at Stanford University. The concept also won him the Best Doctoral Dissertation in Computer Science from the Association of Computing Machinery.