Photographers' age-old problem of blurry snaps could soon be a thing of the past thanks to a ground-breaking camera being developed by scientists in North America.
Dubbed the 'heterodyne light field camera,' experts at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs say the innovation means focussing at the point of capture will no longer be required.
That's because the device has a special lens with ten times the normal depth of field, which users leverage after taking the shot to refocus the image if it appears blurred.
Typically, blurry pictures emerge when photographers fail to focus on both a primary subject - say a person in the foreground - and a secondary subject in the background.
Initial details of the device, obtained by The Daily Mail, suggest that the key to amending images after capture is a transparent slide - a coded aperture - between the lens and the camera.
The masked or coded aperture, which changes the flow of light, could be incorporated into cameras in the future, and will help 'professionalise' blurry shots, its makers told the paper.
Senior research scientist Dr Ramesh Raskar added: "Out-of-focus pictures are the Holy Grail problem. But now we can change the original image, which is extremely beneficial."
May 24, 2007
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