iPhone 5: Will it Have the Lytro Camera Technology?

The iPhone 5, expected to be released this year, could possibly integrate Lytro's groundbreaking light field camera as per the latest report.

According to 9to5Mac, which received an advance copy of the unreleased book “Inside Apple” by Adam Lashinsky, Steve Jobs was impressed by the Lytro camera. The upcoming book mentions that Jobs had a meeting with Ren Ng, Stanford graduate and CEO of a photography company Lytro, and they apparently had chats about photography and product design.

The technology used by Lytro makes use of capturing far more information about a scene than a fixed grid of colored pixels. It uses high resolution sensors combined with a specially designed micro lens array which will capture the intensity, color and direction of light rays entering the camera through a lens. This data will be processed to provide the flat, two-dimensional image. This data can also be mathematically manipulated to change various aspects of the image, including focus point, focal length, depth of field and perspective shift. This means that the Lytro camera technology can also take photos without focusing on a certain object.

One aspect of the iPhone that has received constant improvements over the years is its camera. The original iPhone had a fixed focus lens and a 2 megapixel sensor, while the present iPhone 4S has a camera that features 8 megapixel, HDR-photo taking and 1080P video recording.