Microsoft By Russell Holly Mar. 17, 2014 12:25 pm
The Lytro camera — which is now $300 down from its original $500 — was an amazing concept that never really caught on. Contained within the oddly-shaped camera is an array that allows you the ability to refocus your image after you take it and create photos that feel alive as you interact with them. While it never sold particularly well, one constant comment that has come from its release was how great it would be to have this feature in a phone. Nokia delivered that in a big way with Refocus, an app for Windows Phone devices with the company’s PureView camera. It seems that Nokia has demonstrated the ability to accomplish in software what Lytro did in hardware, but how true is that?
We put the Lytro and a Refocus-equipped phone head-to-head and found that Nokia might really be on to something here.
We tested the Lytro and the Nokia Lumia 928 with Refocus in three different but relatively common photo scenarios, all of which would benefit directly from refocusing. The first thing you’ll notice right away is the difference Nokia’s 16:9 sensor makes against the Lytro’s 1:1 camera. While square photos are common enough nowadays thanks to services like Instagram, the added real estate from the Refocus photos gives you more area to click around and enjoy.
The next thing you’ll notice in comparing these photos is the quality of the image you get at different distances. Nokia is able to offer a consistent image quality at all of the depths it captures due to its superior image sensor, while the sensors on the Lytro struggle with distance and light. As a tradeoff, Lytro’s hardware offers a significantly higher number of places you can click on and get a different experience with, to say nothing of the perspective shift that you get when you click and drag on the Lytro image. You also get an instant capture from Lytro, where Nokia asks that you hold still for a couple of seconds while it takes six rapid fire photos and stitches them together.
The Refocus app also struggles with photos that aren’t taken exactly the way the instructions tell you to, while Lytro’s camera is very much a point and shoot. Refocus requests that you have something in the immediate foreground for the camera to focus on, so the app can do its thing and capture multiple focal points behind it. This works well if you have something right next to the phone that you want to focus in on, but of you’re just shooting a photo of people with other things in the background you’ll find the photo has almost no additional points of focus.
Ultimately it comes down to the camera you have on you. The Lytro camera is perfectly functional, and offers several more software enhancements that Refocus does not yet, but if you’ve already got a Nokia phone in your pocket there’s a much higher chance that you’ll take the slight performance hit in exchange for larger and higher quality images from a device that does way more than just take photos.
Nokia has accomplished something significant here in making this software available for almost all of their phones, and in doing so sets the stage for many other apps like Refocus to exist on many different phones in the near future.
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We put the Lytro and a Refocus-equipped phone head-to-head and found that Nokia might really be on to something here.
We tested the Lytro and the Nokia Lumia 928 with Refocus in three different but relatively common photo scenarios, all of which would benefit directly from refocusing. The first thing you’ll notice right away is the difference Nokia’s 16:9 sensor makes against the Lytro’s 1:1 camera. While square photos are common enough nowadays thanks to services like Instagram, the added real estate from the Refocus photos gives you more area to click around and enjoy.
The next thing you’ll notice in comparing these photos is the quality of the image you get at different distances. Nokia is able to offer a consistent image quality at all of the depths it captures due to its superior image sensor, while the sensors on the Lytro struggle with distance and light. As a tradeoff, Lytro’s hardware offers a significantly higher number of places you can click on and get a different experience with, to say nothing of the perspective shift that you get when you click and drag on the Lytro image. You also get an instant capture from Lytro, where Nokia asks that you hold still for a couple of seconds while it takes six rapid fire photos and stitches them together.
The Refocus app also struggles with photos that aren’t taken exactly the way the instructions tell you to, while Lytro’s camera is very much a point and shoot. Refocus requests that you have something in the immediate foreground for the camera to focus on, so the app can do its thing and capture multiple focal points behind it. This works well if you have something right next to the phone that you want to focus in on, but of you’re just shooting a photo of people with other things in the background you’ll find the photo has almost no additional points of focus.
Ultimately it comes down to the camera you have on you. The Lytro camera is perfectly functional, and offers several more software enhancements that Refocus does not yet, but if you’ve already got a Nokia phone in your pocket there’s a much higher chance that you’ll take the slight performance hit in exchange for larger and higher quality images from a device that does way more than just take photos.
Nokia has accomplished something significant here in making this software available for almost all of their phones, and in doing so sets the stage for many other apps like Refocus to exist on many different phones in the near future.
More...
