light.co offers a $1,700 camera with 16 crummy little sensors and software to combine output from 10 of those at a time into an image that purportedly can compete with a full-size digital camera’s output.
I have a tough time imagining how the output from this little Silicon Valley miracle could be better than from a standard pocketable camera, e.g., the SonyRX100
Perhaps this will be a great camera for casual use in a harsh environment. It doesn’t have the weight and size penalty of a sealed professional grade DSLR.
What does that leave us with? Burning Man!
Readers: What else is an exciting application for this new camera?
The main source of noise in low-light photography is photon shot noise, which is proportional to sensor area. Because of the way lithography defects work, it’s generally cheaper to make 10 small sensors than 1 big one. So there’s merit to the idea. But the samples they’ve posted don’t look good at all (bad noise and other issues) so I doubt this team will be delivering.
I think there’s a market for a camera as good as a DSLR that doesn’t have a giant lens sticking out. But it’s a professional/prosumer market and their site seems more aimed at the mainstream. Most people aren’t dissatisfied enough with cell phone quality to carry another device regardless of its size. And cell phone quality will continue to improve rapidly relative to the velocity of a hardware startup. So it’s got to be as good as a DSLR, or at least better than an RX100 (the pro’s current choice of backup camera). That’s a big ask.
They’re also talking about selectable bokeh and stuff. Absolutely no one will ever buy into that unless you’re at least as good as existing cameras at regular photography. Lytro found that out (I did tell them so).
For $500 right now, you can go to Costco online and buy a 20MP, APS-C sensor Pentax SLR with 2 zooms. The body and lenses are weather sealed and the ISO goes to either 25600 or 51200, for exceptional low light performance.
I’ve been happy with the output from compact cameras for the last several years, as long as all I need is medium wide angle. What I’ve wanted for ages is a compact camera that can duplicate the effect of an 85mm f/1.8 on full frame. In principle a sensor array camera has the ability to do this, though I have no idea is this one in particular will be able to.
At $1,700 this is a joke but the multiple sensor concept has merit. If the Asian manufacturing can get this down to $170 retail (and they can and lower than that too) it would be better than any single sensor camera in that price range. Buying this is like buying a Hamilton Pulsar digital watch for $2,000 ($12,000 in today’s $) in 1972 and 3 years later TI was selling them for $20.
I’ve read through all their documentation and even contacted the company directly, and I really suspect that this camera will never materialize. I don’t believe it can actually work the way they vaguely imply, they haven’t released a single sample image, they’re overstating the capabilities in marketing materials, and they’ve had well-known photographers endorsing it without actually taking pictures with it.
Also, I reviewed the depth-mapping capabilities of the Lytro, which function similar to those mentioned for this camera, and they were basically useless in the real world (though you could carefully construct functional sample images).
They’re also asking for $200 down and a delivery date a full year out. I can’t prove anything one way or the other, but this sounds like the perfect formula for collecting lots of money from people without ever shipping anything.
In microscopy, a rolling average of n frames improves the signal to noise ratio by a factor of sqrt(n). I conclude that using 10 small sensors would result in an improvement of SNR by 3.16x. This could, in theory, improve contrast and therefore improve lateral resolution (if you view individual pixels as overlapping point-spread functions.
However, if this photographic application is anything like microscopes, really the limiting factor would be the optical quality of the glass. The limitation of the quality of the resulting images would largely lie in the quality of the optics.