New System Can Alter Focal Length from Single Exposure

DQE · Post by **DQE** » Mon Mar 30, 2015 1:00 pm

An interesting news item, provoking my personal skepticism as well as my curiosity:

http://www.earthboundlight.com/phototip ... osure.html

Does anyone have any information about this system? I couldn't find anything on Google about the "Focal Length Consortium". The above article wasn't very convincing to me, and it seems to be lacking in detail.

Best wishes,

Phil

rjlittlefield · Post by **rjlittlefield** » Mon Mar 30, 2015 1:10 pm

Somehow I suspect that this was intended for release on April 1.

A snippet from near the end of the article...

It's not entirely clear how the Focal Field System works but somehow by means of what the patent text refers to as "cropping" one can take an image shot at a wider focal length and trim all four sides by equal proportion to produce an image that has the identical framing of one originally shot with a longer focal length. Imagine taking a shot made with a 50mm lens and "cropping" it so that it comes out the same as one shot with a 100mm lens. And the trick works with any type of image regardless of subject matter or exposure.

--Rik

DQE · Post by **DQE** » Mon Mar 30, 2015 2:16 pm

Rik,

You're correct - it *does* sound like an April Fool's joke!

I wonder if the Lytro camera enthusiasts are active in this project, assuming it's not an intentional joke? Just a thought.

It's surely more than a little improbable for a consortium allegedly involving major vendors to have zero Google search results.

johan · Post by **johan** » Mon Mar 30, 2015 2:27 pm

This sentence in the article rather gives it away fellas

On condition of anonymity, Mr. Primeiro de Abril, a general partner at the Consortium's offices in Tolos

DQE · Post by **DQE** » Mon Mar 30, 2015 5:04 pm

johan wrote:This sentence in the article rather gives it away fellas

On condition of anonymity, Mr. Primeiro de Abril, a general partner at the Consortium's offices in Tolos

That should teach me not to skim-read past text in a language other than English!

rjlittlefield · Post by **rjlittlefield** » Mon Mar 30, 2015 11:33 pm

On condition of anonymity, Mr. Primeiro de Abril, a general partner at the Consortium's offices in Tolos

Hah! I don't recall getting far enough to even see that name. Might not have recognized it anyway.

BTW, I am amused to note that there's more than a grain of relevance in that April Fool's joke. When the first really dense smart phone camera came out, almost 40 megapixels, I recall reading that one of the justifications for so many pixels was that it allowed really good digital zoom. Perhaps even more extreme, I personally have been known to mount up an 8 mm fisheye for snapshooting at certain events, not because I want the strange geometry, but because I know that no matter how wide a rectilinear lens I wish I'd been using, I can recreate the same image minus some quality by post-processing to correct for the fisheye distortion and crop as desired.

--Rik