Luminous Landscape Forum
Equipment & Techniques => Mirrorless Cameras => Topic started by: donbga on September 29, 2017, 11:44:51 am
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Is this the last one we will ever need?
Light L16 (https://light.co/)
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So I've always had a problem when handing my camera to someone to take a picture for me...they somehow always get a finger on the lens. If that is so common on a normal camera....this camera will be a nightmare in that sense. I can imagine handing a camera off to someone who blocks half the lenses trying to take a picture!
Anyways looks interesting. I remember when they launched the concept. I almost reserved. In the end it was too much money for what I perceive as a toy at this point. I'll wait to try one myself at some point. I tried the lytro in a store and it was completely off putting in use. Cameras need solid tactile execution too in my opinion. Extreme example... that is the only reason Leica survives. Best feeling camera made.
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Superseded by your smartphone within 3 years time.
If you create a smartphone userexperience with smartphone formfactor and smartphone ergonomics, guess what they will compare this with?
Additionally, I fail to see the point. Why not limit yourself to 3 sensors to capture R, G, and B separately, with a normal single lensmount?
Or similarly with 4 sensors to capture additional grayscale? Or just several bayer sensors to capture superresolution? Because basically, that is what is offered here. The unprecedented imagequality is not a result of the lens configuration, but of capturing so many pixels with so many sensors. The sensors can be relatively cheap/low-quality, because you stack/bin enough pixels to overcome small-sensor quality.
You probably would like RGB capture in a smartphone as well, but in a smartphone the additional lenses make sense because of AR and depthperception.
I posit: Photography is about lenscontrol, therefore this device isn't about photography.
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Flickr site for un-curated L16 photos...
https://www.flickr.com/groups/lightl16/pool/
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Quite poor review by Petapixel
https://petapixel.com/2017/11/13/light-l16s-first-reviews/
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I've been suspicious of these computational imaging systems since dabbling with the Lytro Illum.
Anyone who's tried focus stacking or HDR knows how subtle and involved the process of combining multiple exposures into one image can be, and anything which tries to do it automatically is going to run into problems.
On the Illum, the auto-generated depth map worked OK some of the time, and the computationally generated blur on out-of-focus areas looked OK but nothing like actual lens bokeh. But when it went wrong, which was often, it could be an absolute black hole of time consuming fiddling to try to fix. Stray hairs, fur, see-through fabrics, anything even slightly subtle and it all went to pot.
Now the L16 is not trying to do light-field imaging, but it's still trying to stitch together a hell of a lot of different lenses and sensors, and I just don't believe it will be reliably able to do so in real-world imaging situations. The best that's likely to happen is like iPhone panoramas- great when they work, but if they screw up, you're done. I wouldn't use such a new-fangled thing for any critical paid work for several generations, at least.
So it might be interesting, but I'll confidently predict it will be no dSLR killer. A few generations on with multi-lens phones and the whole software development weight of Apple and Google and this route might be viable; even then, how many of us pro photographers would rely SOLELY on an iPhone for any mission-critical work? I dunno about you but I always have more than one system with me on any critical shoot (at the very least a spare body!)
Hywel