Lytro: Best Digital Camera Ever?

There's an extremely cool new kind of camera coming soon that's promising to totally change digital photography forever. It's called the Lytro and it's been getting tons of buzz online over the past week or so. The Lytro lets you change the focal length of a digital photo after you've already taken it. That incredible functionality is causing some experts to call it the best digital camera ever made.

The Lytro digicam uses "light field" sensor technology which basically captures all data related to the light rays that deflect off of objects -- including color, intensity, and vector. A normal digital camera captures only a small amount of data, recording light ray data as a simple sum total and creating static photos that can't really be changed (at least in terms of focus).

Light field technology represents a HUGE leap in photo-taking capability. It literally records every bit of light travelling in every direction off of every object through every point in space in a photo scene. Lytro's creators say it's the first consumer camera that can truly create "living photographs" just about anywhere. Traditional light field photos required 100+ cameras to take a single photo!

The end result is that photos taken with the Lytro can be easily adjusted, using your computer, according to how you want them to look. You don't have to worry about whether or not your camera's auto-focus feature is targeting the right part of a scene. It also allows for much better fast-motion photo taking. Finally -- and maybe most importantly -- the Lytro allows you to take "3D-like" pictures with just a single lens and without needing special glasses to view the 3 dimensional effects.

According to famous venture capitalist Marc Andreessen (a Lytro investor):

"Lytro’s breakthrough technology will make conventional digital cameras obsolete... It has to be seen to be believed."

We say: The Lytro sounds pretty damn cool. Our photos are almost never in focus and, if they are, the auto-focus is usually way off the mark. Expect some amazing "3D" Las Vegas photos taken by Lytro users in the near future!

Learn some mo': Lytro: The camera that could change photography forever