The Lytro has been kicking around for a few months — we covered its launch in issue 207 of the magazine — and it picked up an award at CES last week, but the camera has yet to actually ship. However, the company had a few pre-production models to let us try out the intriguing new camera technology.

The Lytro is a light-field camera, also called a plenoptic camera, and the result of research from Stanford University — the company’s website even links to the CEO’s dissertation. The idea is that the Lytro’s special sensor captures everything in the “light field” — essentially all the data about light’s intensity, direction and colour, with nothing omitted.

Shots are focused after, rather than before, the photo is taken via software on a computer (or previewed on the camera itself). This not only offers the potential to re-imagine photos and create intriguing images utterly abusing depth of field, but also means they’re snapped almost instantly, without the photographer or the hardware having to ponder over where to focus. The sensor captures so much information, it can create 3D images and slightly shift the vantage point from which the picture was taken, although it seems to work better in some photographs than others, so there is a bit of learning curve.

A light 214g, it’s small enough to hold in one hand — and I have tiny, child-sized hands. There are only two buttons, the on switch on the bottom and shutter on the top. See a shot you want to snap? It powers on in a flash, and your picture will be snapped in what feels like an instant. It is ridiculously fast.

This makes the Lytro perfect for snapshots; it’s easy to imagine it being handy as a point-and-shoot, especially after a few weeks over the holidays spent chasing my sisters’ children around with a DSLR, trying to focus on quick-moving toddlers.

The Lytro features an f/2 aperture and 8x optical zoom, which is controlled via a touch-sensitive ridge on the top of the device. The screen is also touch-sensitive; tap on the screen to zoom in or focus on any spot of the image directly in the camera. We weren’t given the desktop software or copies of our photos to try focusing after the fact on a computer, but it was clear from tapping around the images on the camera that it was indeed  possible to pick out faces or objects to sharpen up and focus on after the fact.

The camera can take pictures from as little as four inches as way from the subject, with the ability to focus on anything in the image past that point. The cameras we were handed had an experimental creative mode — which may not make it into the first round of cameras — that boosted the Lytro’s macro abilities. Put the subject directly in-front of the lens and tap the touchscreen, and the Lytro can automatically focus on the up-close object.

The bright, colourful form-factor looks like a toy, and was certainly eye-catching; twice in the hour-long trial with the camera in the lobby of the Wynn hotel in Las Vegas, I was stopped and asked what exactly was in my hands, and could they try it out. (The answer, according to watching PRs, was no.)

Half of it is made up of the camera lenses, with the sensor sitting around the the midpoint. The front is made from aluminium, while the back half is rubber.

One compelling aspect of the Lytro is that the firm is constantly working to update the camera’s firmware — and upgrades such as the creative mode will be offered free.  One feature in the works is the ability to hit a button in the desktop software to put everything in focus, rather than having to pick a single point.

There are of course downsides. The Lytro is limited in what it can do. There’s no flash or any way to adjust ISO or other settings, meaning you have to work with the light you’ve got. The resolution doesn’t appear to be particularly great, and the company tries to get around this by pitching it as a device for online sharing. The company says the photographs can be exported to a 1,080 x 1,080 pixel JPG, advising users they won’t be able to cleanly print larger sized versions of their images.

Another major downside is that the desktop software, necessary to edit the light-field photo files, only works on Macs. A Windows version is in the works, however.

All in, the Lytro is an intriguing little camera that’s surprisingly fun to use. It’s no replacement for a DSLR, but at first glance the ease and speed of shooting could make it a handy point-and-shoot, for those willing to do a wee bit of post-production on snapshots to pick a focal point and export their images to standard file types.

A 16GB version, which the company says will hold 750 pictures, costs $499, while an 8GB version costs $399. The Lytro is available for pre-order now and shipping next month, but sadly initially only in the US.

But while Twitter has undoubtedly played a major role in events, there’s a technology which I think has been even more pivotal. I’m talking about camera-phones — such as the one that captured the last living moments of a young Iranian woman named Neda, shot dead during a protest on Saturday in the streets of Tehran.

The shocking footage has quickly propagated around the web, arousing horror and outrage in Iran and across the globe. Without a doubt it’s given the protests new fuel and new focus: I’ve seen more than one Iranian Twitterer describe Neda’s death as the turning point that persuaded them to join the uprising.

Interestingly, though, it’s been unofficially estimated that on the day Neda died, over a hundred other protesters were also killed in Iran — yet no one’s rallying around them.

Partly, of course, that could be because Neda was a young woman, who appears to have been acting wholly peacefully when she was murdered. It’s easy to get angry about her death, while with other protestors we simply don’t know the circumstances.

But that’s the important point: we don’t know, because however tragic the other deaths may have been, they weren’t captured on video. We can only ever know of them at second hand. And for that reason they’ll never provoke a reaction as visceral and emotional as what we feel when we actually see the life slowly fade from Neda’s eyes.

Clearly, it’s impossible to say what will happen in Iran over the coming days and weeks, but the protests don’t seem to be petering out — if anything, dissatisfaction with the regime is growing. With a general strike now brewing alongside continued unrest we could conceivably be heading for a major shake-up of power in Iran.

And any success the protesters achieve will have been made possible not by external influence — but by the camera-phone, and the incredible rallying power of a humble video file.

I did ask Polaroid back then about the possibility of integrating the printer into its digital cameras to come up with a true successor to the Polaroid instant camera, and the response was, with a wry smile, that advancements would come “at a later date”.

Now Amateur Photographer is asking its readers to help design Polaroid’s next camera: a ‘professional and business’ model with an integrated printer capable of producing 4 x 3in prints – the same size as the iconic Polaroid prints of old. A survey on the site allows readers to specify attributes like pixel count, print quality and the battery’s print capacity, with prizes for the best suggestions.

Lower-end models for consumers are also rumoured to be in the pipeline with an integrated 2 x 3in PoGo printer, but it’s the 4 x 3in prints we really want. I’ve seen the prints and they’re not bad at all – they dry instantly and the level of detail is perfectly adequate, but it’s the sheer convenience that quickly stamped out my initial doubts. Hopefully Polaroid will go the whole hog and add some good on-camera editing tools, too.

A little argument has broken out in the PC Pro office as to the point of such a device in this day and age, but I can see it catching on as long as the camera doesn’t double in size to accomodate the printer. The new cameras are due out in 2009 and here’s my guess as to what they definitely won’t look like.

To the embarrassment of my family I had items from my bag confiscated at both.

This often happens to me, as an inveterate tinkerer and technology hoarder; bike parts taken by Science Museum staff, USB drives and mobile phones at a laptop manufacturer’s design centre. It’s no big deal to me, as long as it’s justified.

On the Eye it was a small toolkit I carry in case my bike falls to pieces. Fair enough; the spanner could be used as a weapon, perhaps, or to undo the capsule and send it plunging into the Thames. At the concert, though, it was my DSLR which was flagged up, as I was told that on the second day of the two-day event, staff had been told to stop “big cameras” from entering. This has been happening more and more in the last year or two.

The problem here was nothing to do with security, but more to do with copyright. The organisers didn’t want people to take shots of the bands on “professional” cameras, even though everyone there had paid a considerable fee to see said bands. Strangely, no compact cameras or mobile phones were being taken, though.

So, at the entrance I was told that I needed to hand in my Nikon D40 at a steward’s office, and was ushered through the gate. I’m ashamed to admit that after a very, very brief search for this office I instead walked straight towards the stage, and as a result managed to get some lovely shots of my family relaxing in the sun. None of the stage, though – a shot of Sting from a quarter of a mile away isn’t much of a memento as far as I’m concerned.

The true piracy, as the concert organisers see it, was being perpetrated not by us “big camera” users, but with mobile phones. Cheap memory cards can handle lengthy clips now, and several hundred people seemed to be recording the whole concert from various angles. For what reason I may never know, as a two-hour set filmed in YouTube-quality seems like a waste of time to me.

Try taking 35,000 people’s mobile phones away, though, and see what happens…

Although the Eye was practically made for cameras, it seems strange that they are welcomed with open arms there, but (half-heartedly) banned elsewhere. Strange, also, that the organisers of the concert were happy to let me take a toolkit full of pointy metal things into their gig, but not a camera.

Perhaps technology needs to offer the solution here, as well as being the problem. Anti-camera technology has been around for a while, and could stop people taking pictures of certain copyrighted areas, designs, people, etc. while allowing photographs of friends and family without the intervention of security guards. Of course, another solution would be for people to lighten up about copyright a little.

The image you see above is the result of a small torrent of Canon IXUS cameras that cascaded into the office today. There’s an IXUS 80 IS; an IXUS 85 IS; an IXUS 90 IS; and an IXUS 970 IS.

You’ll notice they all look rather similar.

You’ll notice they’re all emblazoned with Image Stabilizer and AiAF logos. You’ll notice they all have zoom rings around their shutter buttons.

What you won’t notice purely from the picture is that they all have megapixel ratings between 8 and 10, near-identical menu systems, screens of either 2.5in or 3in, image quality that’s a gnat’s particulars away from the same, and super features like face detection and tracking.

Granted, the 970 IS has a better zoom range, with 5x rather than the 3x of the other three.

But really.

Canon, by all accounts, is one of the top three companies in the world when it comes to R&D. But it seems to be turning into a slave to product lifecycles, which are now almost literally measured in weeks. The press release for the IXUS 80 IS, for instance, dropped into my inbox on 24th January. The release for the IXUS 85 IS arrived on 13th March.

That’s barely a month and a half.

Canon, of course, will argue that the two models are complementary, not competitive. I’d argue that they’re just confusing. The salesman down Tottenham Court Rd would argue to the punter that this one is five better than that one.

Whichever argument you plump for, I’m pretty sure the world could do without at least one of these – admittedly fine – digital cameras. And that’s (literally) not the half of it. Pop over to the IXUS product page on Canon’s website and you’ll see that the current line-up consists of the IXUS 70, IXUS 75, IXUS 80 IS, IXUS 85 IS, IXUS 90 IS, IXUS 860 IS, IXUS 950 IS, IXUS 960 IS and (pause for breath) IXUS 970 IS.

And then there’s the PowerShot range – a further 12 models.

There’s choice, and then there’s sheer bewilderment.

I. Am. Confused.

My 350D produces 8 million pixels; the 450D 12.2 million. So here’s a 100% crop of two shots I took with the two cameras, roughly 20 seconds apart. I used the same lens (a Tamron 28-75mm f/2.8 XR Di), at the same exposure settings (1/80th of a second at f/8) – click to enlarge them to full size:

Both were taken in RAW mode and processed in Canon’s own Digital Photo Professional application with identical default settings – same white balance, same sharpness, same contrast, same everything. I think you’ll agree, the difference in detail is less than obvious. The shot on the right – the 450D – is a little larger in size of course, but the actual rendition of detail is as near identical as makes no odds.

Which basically proves the point that there’s no sense in worrying about megapixels any more: the limiting factor as far as detail is concerned is far more likely to be your lens or sensor noise, not the number of pixels your camera can spit out.

That’s not to say the newer model is completely devoid of improvements, but I’m certainly not tempted to upgrade my 350D merely on the strength of more pixels.

Moving on from that though, the new model does have 14-bit digital-to-analogue conversion, which theoretically means more colour detail and greater leeway when it comes to heavy editing compared to the 12 bits of the 350D. To wit, here’s the same shot but with the contrast turned up in both (to +4 in DPP):

You can see that 14 bits is better than an extra four megapixels: the 350D shot on the left has started to lose detail to oversaturation, while it’s been retained in the 450D shot.

But is it worth paying £600-odd for a 450D, instead of picking up a new 350D – they’re still around if you look – and a decent extra lens for the same price?

Nah.

First impressions are good – it’s very light, small and pocketable, exhibits the usual solid Canon build quality, 10-megapixel resolution, a 3x zoom ISO up to 1600, face detection and an impressive-looking optical image stabiliser similar to the system seen on our A List favourite, the Canon Ixus 960 IS.

Be sure to check the Reviews section for the full lowdown – we’ll be giving it the PC Pro treatment very soon.

Here’s an early shot taken with the camera…