Camera that lets you shoot first,focus later

But is Lytros technology just a neat feature,or is it the next big thing in cameras?

The founding team of the Silicon Valley start-up and investors who have put in 50 million are betting on the latter. The technology has won praise from computer scientists and raves from early users of its prototype camera.

Lytros founder and chief executive is Ren Ng,31. His achievement,experts said,has been to take research projects of recent years requiring perhaps 100 digital cameras lashed to a supercomputer and squeeze that technology into a camera headed for the consumer market later this year.

Ng explained the concept in 2006 in his PhD thesis at Stanford University,which won the worldwide competition for the best doctoral dissertation in computer science that year from the Association for Computing Machinery. Since then Ng has been trying to translate the idea into a product that can be brought to market.

The Lytro camera captures far more light data,from many angles,than is possible with a conventional camera. It accomplishes that with a special sensor called a microlens array,which puts the equivalent of many lenses into a small space. That is the heart of the breakthrough, said Pat Hanrahan,a Stanford professor,who was Ngs thesis adviser but is not involved in Lytro.

But the wealth of raw light data comes to life only with sophisticated software that lets a viewer switch points of focus. This allows still photographs to be explored as never before. They become interactive,living pictures, Ng said. Lytro will have a Facebook app.STEVE LOHR