The Light L16, a camera that employs 16 individual cameras with 13-megapixel sensors, has now completed its product development and is available for purchase.
We reported in April that Light would be releasing the L16 in July, and in a statement on its website the company has announced that the Light L16 is now shipping.
“Our cutting-edge technology has come a long way in a short amount of time,” the company writes in a blog post.
“Not too long ago, the L16 camera was simply one little black box. Using a computer, our engineers had to manually position and focus each camera module, so that the sensors perfectly overlapped.
“That way, when the camera would fuse and stitch together 10+ images, the final photo would be accurate—down to the micron. Firing one shot took at least an hour or more.”
The Light L16 can produce images with up to 52-megapixel resolution from its 16 multi-aperture computational cameras.
The Light L16 is about the size of your smartphone and offers 5x optical zoom. As you zoom in or out the L16 chooses the best combination of its 28mm, 70mm and 150mm camera modules to use for the job, promising no degradation in image quality when you shoot close up, for instance.
Explaining how these camera modules work, Light says: “We developed our own 70mm and 150mm camera modules, complete with custom optics and electrical components.
“To put this in perspective, most smartphone cameras contain 30mm or 50mm lenses. The higher focal length lenses we were looking for weren’t even on the market yet, so we had to invent them ourselves.”
The Light L16, on paper at least, certainly appears one of the more interesting new cameras we’ve seen in a while. We can’t wait to get one in for testing.
anyone out there actually receive one yet?