Gadgetory

this is David with the verge and this is the light row it's a digital camera but it's really unlike any digital camera we've seen before and a lot of that is because of the technology inside the camera it's called light field technology and what it does is instead of just measuring the color and the intensity of the light coming at the camera it measures the direction the light is moving to and that allows the camera to do a lot more processing and a lot more editing after the fact the great thing about the LED show is that you can actually change the focus of a shot after you take it it takes all of the light at once and then lets you edit the focus after you take the picture the light roll also looks different from any camera we've ever seen instead of looking like a rectangular camera it kind of looks like a retracted telescope it's about four inches long and it weighs about eight ounces and there's a lens on one end and a small display on the other and that's basically all there is to the camera part of it is a rubberized grip with a shutter button and raised dots that you swipe your finger along to zoom and there's a power button on the bottom along with the microUSB port but other than that it's just the anodized aluminum body available in red grey or blue and really nothing else as good-looking as it is I can't help but wish it looked and felt a little more like a regular camera partly because I would avoid the weird looks but partly because it's a little awkward to hold and you never really get used to the way you're supposed to use the camera it would be better if it were more in the style of a camera like the olympus EP l3 which has small lenses and this seems like it would mount perfectly onto a camera like that and be really usable just with this extra cool photography feature on top of it the other problem with the way that the light show is built now is that the display on the back is just not very good it's a small one and a half inch LCD 128 pixels by 128 pixels and it's viewing angles are so bad that as soon as you get off axis it becomes kind almost negative colored and you can't really see what's going on and it's pixelated even in great lighting and it just makes pictures look bad and hard to see properly on the bright side the displays touch screen is actually really good the interface is super simple there's a small menu you can drag up from the bottom of the screen which will show how much battery or how much storage you have left on the camera and you can swipe from right to left to see your pictures and then double tap to zoom and you can pan around and again it's a small screen so the touch screen isn't full-featured as it could be but it does work really well for one particular kind of shot the light row takes really really cool pictures if you have a subject close to you close to the lens and one that's far away being able to switch the focus back and forth after the fact is really cool and it does a really good job of splitting the focus so that you can really drastically change when you move from the front to the back for any pictures other than that though the light show really doesn't do that well and especially in low-light when there's not a ton of data for the camera to be collecting it just takes really awful pictures with a lot of noise and grain and the focusing effect pretty much becomes useless a lot of the appeal of the light row is because there's so much you can do with the photos after you shoot them there's a light row desktop software which is only available for Macs right now but it's coming for Windows later this year and you can import photos in there and then do some neat things with them once you've imported your photos the Lytro app is pretty simple you can group your photos or organize them into events you can also tweak the focus of your photos after the fact until you get them the way you want and then you can export them as JPEGs which you can use in other apps but the JPEGs only come out as 1080 by 1080 which is barely over one megapixel and is quite small right now the light row is kind of an odd thing to review the technology behind it is really amazing light field photography definitely feels like it's the future of photography and part of the advantage of this camera is that it's actually going to get better over time we got to see early builds of things like through a 3d viewer and perspective shift which actually changes how the picture looks as you pan around it based on how you would move your head that technology is amazing and it can all be applied by a software update but for right now light show feels more like a feature than a full-fledged camera system it would be an amazing thing to have in a phone or a DSLR but for right now if you're going to buy this it's purely as an add-on to another camera and this is definitely not something especially at $399 that you're going to buy as your only camera you