Thursday, April 07, 2016

Lytro Exits Consumer Camera Business

Imaging Resource, DPReview: Lytro exits consumer light-field camera business, apparently due to the lack of the consumer interest. The company CEO Jason Rosenthal says in his blog post "While consumer Light Field cameras offered a number of true technological breakthroughs such as interactive 3D pictures, radical lens specs, and the ability to focus a picture after the fact we had a number of disadvantages as well including 4X larger file sizes and lower resolution in comparison to other similarly priced cameras. The cold hard fact was that we were competing in an established industry where the product requirements had been firmly cemented in the minds of consumers by much larger more established companies. This issue was compounded by the fact that the consumer camera market was declining by almost 35% per year driven by the surge in smartphone photography and changing consumer tastes."

The company's Vimeo video talks about its new focus on Immerge VR cinema production platform:


Lytro Immerge from Lytro on Vimeo.

7 comments:

  1. Oh give me a break. Camera was expensive and yet it was producing low quality pictures, it was also slow, fixed lens, with low quality color science, low dynamic range, not to mention the pictures were full of artifacts when you tried to play around with depth focusing. An expensive gimmick.. just like the other multi lens camera that is being developed. Now the Immerge finally sounds like a real product.. lightfield videos.. wow! it's a winner if it's done properly.. positional tracking and proper stereoscopic viewpoint rendering without any weird distortion will so incredibly enhance the VR experience.

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  2. R. I. P., Lytro!

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  3. They blatantly stole other trademarked names of imaging companies. Got out before they were sued. Another vaporware HW company selling flawed technology to stupid, vapid VC's. Taunted the waters for other good, solid technologies. Just more proof the HW bubble has burst. If it weren't for their VC funding, they would have been outtahere a long time ago.

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    1. This is why I prefer to do it "the Apple way". Product first, introduce when it is done. Deliver in short time. These paper-releases make things really hard for hardware guys who can deliver, as every hype is followed by a long series of delays and sometimes product cancellation.

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  4. Well these guys have pushed a lab technology to the market with a real product. The market reaction is bad and this is more than common in technology field. Things change and maybe one day people can find another great application with it, who knows. If all the startup works and makes fast money, the VC should change their name in this case.

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  5. who out there made a 755Mpix 300fps imager with 16 stops range?

    https://www.lytro.com/cinema

    blog entry dated April 11th, not 1st http://blog.lytro.com/

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  6. Gee I don't know, but it certainly isn't these guys. They just keep missing market requires every move they make. What director wants to do everything in post? I don't think any director or DP worth their their title would put the creative and their entire intent over to a colorist in post. Just isn't done, except in Lytro's world. These guys sure could have benefited from bringing in a veteran who has gone through a few cycles before they went to market. Newsflash 20 somethings, the market rarely comes to you.

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