Amazing Lytro Camera Lets You Refocus on Any Point of an Image

This is a subject you don't want to get close to. This scary spider was re-focused after the photo was taken. (Lytro)

Last night's pictures a little blurry? Are your photography skills less than inspiring?

Thanks to a new camera, badly focused images are one less thing you’ll have to worry about.

Silicon Valley start-up Lytro has developed a technology that lets you refocus on any point in an image after it has been taken. It works by recording as much data as possible about the light field in front of the lens -- delivering a digital photo that you can adjust in almost an infinite number of ways.

Users can focus on any point in the photo, change the light levels -- and if using a 3D camera -- tilt and shift the image in three dimensions. The camera is the brain child of Ren Ng, a Stanford professor whose research has been named best doctoral dissertation in computer science by the Association for Computing Machinery.

With Ng’s technology, images “become interactive, living pictures,” he told The New York Times.

Ng has been praised for his Lytro camera, which is the equivalent of strapping 100 digital cameras to a supercomputer and squeezing it all into a camera the size of a lipstick case, the report said.

The camera is more like a viewfinder -- it’s long and thin with a rubberized end and has just two buttons and a sliding zoom.

Its storage capacity ranges from 8GB to 16GB depending on the model, and you should be able to fill the entire memory with pictures before the battery runs out, according to Mashable.

You can download images to your computer via USB. Once the images are downloaded you can then manipulate the photo using a specialized photo interface which also lets you share images with your friends on Facebook, and other social networks.

According to the website, if you share your images from a Macintosh computer, your friends will also have the same ability to play with the photos without needing any special software.

The cameras are available to pre-order on Lytro’s website. Prices start at $399. A more advanced model will cost you $499.

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