Nokia shows off camera gimmicks to PIMP YOUR PICCIES Nokia introduced some new imaging technology which allows your Facebook chums to interact and fiddle with the depth field on your photos while you do the same to theirs. As illustrated in a couple of examples here, you’ll be able to refocus an image after it’s been taken, choosing to highlight a foreground object or the …
So, what good does it do to have more pixels in your sensor if the light isn't focused when it arrives? My understanding was that there was some fundamentally novel chicanery going on with the way the Lytro sensor worked; I'm not seeing how what Nokia is claiming could be accomplished with a single shot of a conventional sensor, regardless of resolution...
So, turns out it's a cheat - according to another bit I read, it fires off eight or ten shots, presumably at different focus settings. I'm guessing it then builds an in-focus / out-of-focus map for each shot (or maybe squashes it into a rough depth map) and crossfades between them depending on where you click.
Marketing gimmick.
Obviously they're doing a little work to match up the images, but that's pretty simple stuff. I'd guess that the higher pixel resolution may give them a leg up in determining high frequency content of a given area of the image (which is how you tell if it's in-focus - if there's a lot of high frequency content, it must be in focus; if not, it probably (but not definitely) isn't).
It's a nifty thing in and of itself, but to act like they have something special going on because of it is disingenuous at best.
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