Pelican: The Shape of Things to Come?

If you’re up-to-date on camera technology you’ll have heard of the Lytro, a camera which captures reflected rays from different angles of incidence to construct an image whose focus-point can be controlled and adjusted after the fact.

Now Pelican is barging in on Lytro (which has been featured on our sister blog) territory and going one better: you can choose multiple focus-points which can be at different planes in the image.  As Leo Kelion describes it in Computational photography on BBC, “a photographer in New York could choose to make the details of her husband’s face and the Statue of Liberty behind him sharp but everything else – including the objects in between them – blurred.”

Kelion’s interesting article is not solely about Pelican but is about the shape of things to come in ‘computational photography.’  With this in mind, Pelican’s technology too is not a mature, market-ready product.

Another leg-up that Pelican has over Lytro is that it is a technology that is small enough to be housed in a mobile phone.  No wonder, then, that Nokia has invested in it.

Nokia’s Gazillion-Pixel Play

Image via CrunchBase

Talking about Nokia, let’s talk about Nokia.  Their spanking new Lumia 1020 has 41 megapixels!  We stay with Kelion on BBC for this roundup.  

Though sheer number of megapixels is not the main driving force when consumers choose a mobile phone, this statistic will draw attention to Nokia, which should have a spillover effect to its other products – that’s the idea behind this handset with the ‘Are you kidding?’ stat.

All those megapixels aren’t only a ploy, mind you: where image quality is concerned Kelion says that analysts are nearly unanimous that the Lumia 1020 is on top of the mobile phone pile.  The camera – oops, mobile phone! – also offers Full HD video and an optical image stabilizer.

Kelion writes that this handset carries “a premium price” and perhaps it does, but where else can you get all that high-high-res plus a few optical-camera goodies thrown in and a bona fide smartphone at that price?  Over to you, Apple.

Last Word

You may have heard this one before but last word to neilwinch: “A photographer went to a dinner party where he showed many of his photographs. The lady of the house said, ‘Those are very nice pictures, you must have a great camera.’ He said nothing, but when leaving for home offered the following compliment to the lady of the house: ‘The meal was very nice, you must have great pots and pans.'”