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[cool music playing]
A good picture is like a time capsule.
It lets you capture a moment [takes picture]
and enjoy it for many years to come.
Modern features like auto-focus and large image sensors
make taking a perfect photo a snap.
After the fact we can use software
to make images sharper or get rid of things we don't want in our photo.
But there's still one thing even the best digital cameras can't do-
fix a photo that's out of focus.
Remember that blurry mess that was supposed to capture a kid's game-winning catch?
Fortunately, there's a camera that can help even the most photo-challenged of us.
A light-field camera lets you fix the focus of an image even after its been taken.
So how does it work?
The image sensor in a normal digital camera adds up all of the rays of light around
around whatever you're photographing and counts them as a single amount of light.
It's helpful to use music as an analogy.
Taking a conventional digital photo is like recording all of the instruments
in a band all at once.
A light field camera, on the other hand
would be like recording individual instruments on separate audio tracks.
That's because a light field camera uses a special sensor to record
the color and intensity of light traveling in every direction through every point in space.
Breaking down a song into individual tracks lets you fine tune a sound.
In the same way, breaking down a photo into individual rays of light lets you improve
the clarity of a picture even after its been taken.
Lets use a LYTRO light field camera as an example of how this works.
A LYTRO field camera has a lens, a light field sensor, and a micro processor.
This set-up isn't too different from a normal digital camera.
What is different about the LYTRO is that its sensor is covered by a matrix
of micro lenses.
These provide an enormous amount of information about direction, color and intensity of light.
Then, the LYTRO's micro processor figures out what an image should look like
when it's in focus.
In fact, it doesn't even have a focus mechanism.
You just point, and shoot.
For Scientific American's Instant Egghead, I'm Larry Greenemeier.