The focus-free Lytro camera is so good that Steve Jobs reportedly wanted to roll the technology into the iPhone. Though it’s not quite ready for sale yet, a teardown has revealed that the camera is capable of communicating via Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
The long, boxy camera has plenty of room for guts, so its nice to find out that it’s home to some impressive technology. The pictures from the teardown show us some stuff we already know about, like the fictional-sounding 11 Megaray image sensor and its tiny 1.5-inch LCD screen.
But, elsewhere, there’s a Marvell Avastar chip, which offers Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, meaning that the Lytro should be able to offer wireless transfer of images. The camera also has a Zoran processor — though we’re not quite sure what that’s for — and some on-board flash storage.
The Wi-Fi and Bluetooth make what was an already exciting product even more tempting: the ability to change depth of focus and wirelessly transmit your snaps after they’re taken is surely too good to pass up. The Lytro is only available for pre-order at the moment, but I for one am struggling to resist. [Wireless Goodness via Ubergizmo]
Image: Wireless Goodness
John
Friday, February 10, 2012 at 9:16 AMHow would they ever get that into an iPhone? I’m assuming the camera is that shape because it needs to be that shape, of course. Maybe it doesn’t need to, but it’s an awkward shape, so you’d guess it’s a necessity.
Jazz
Friday, February 10, 2012 at 9:45 AMIt’s not. Most of that box is actually the zoom mechanism, which if it was put into an iPhone wouldn’t be neccessary. The ‘magic’ is really just a small lens array that sits right on top of the image sensor, which is the “Light FIeld Sensor”. While it’s still biggish in the Lytro, making it smaller would simply be a manufacturing issue and something Apple could easily get their manufacturing slaves to deal with.
Russ
Friday, February 10, 2012 at 3:32 PMGoogle says Zoran “Offers integrated circuits and software products for digital audio and video compression applications” and from what I gather the light field technology pulls in a lot of data so maybe it’s just some hardware compression to speed it up? Unless it can capture LF-Video?? That’d be coooool!