Photograph Now. Focus Later.

Major electronics companies like Sony, Canon, Nikon and Olympus currently dominate the world’s $40 billion consumer camera market. Now a new company—and by “new” we mean it was literally launched yesterday—aims to change that. The goal of this company, Lytro, is no less to revolutionize photography.

Their camera’s most revolutionary feature: Photographers can focus their shots after they take them!

Even those photography purists who are horrified that focus will soon be a photograph feature that can be altered in post-production editing have to admit that the technology is cool.

The technology works through the magic of computational photography. Basically, a Lytro camera takes optically coded photographs that capture light traveling in every direction and through every point in a photographed scene. All of that light data can then be decoded and then recoded to produce a new image. (Try playing around with it yourself at the Lytro picture gallery).

Other cool camera features announced by Lytro:

• All photos can be 3D-ified.

• Fast turn-on speed—take a photo less than a second after powering up the camera.

• Supposedly amazing-quality low light photography without use of a flash.

The Lytro camera is due out in late 2011. No specific price has been announced but Lytro predicts the price will be comparable to other high-end consumer point-and-shoot models. Subscribe to the Spot Cool Stuff tech RSS feed to get our future Lytro camera review (and all our other tech posts) as they are published.

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