Use my link ridge.com/computerclan to get up to 30% off through December 20th and enter free to win a Ridge bundle worth $4,000. Video Sponsored by Ridge. P.S. See you on NOVEMBER 28 at 6:00 PM CST (UTC-6) for Computer Clan Live! Tune in on this channel! Also, enable all notifications with the bell, so you don't miss it! 🔔
@@theatheisthammer I am not so sure. ASIC is not software upgradable. If the functions performed by the ASIC chip are vital, software upgrade cannot help.
I was a Light employee for the last three years of the company's life, so the video saddens me (not that it's unfair). All I will say is that it was one of the most enjoyable jobs of my 40 years in software, Dave and Rajiv were great bosses, and almost everyone I worked with was extremely talented and dedicated to making the best product possible. Unfortunately, success requires more than good intentions.
I figured but why on earth did they not have that ready before shipping? Not like that should have been hard. Short of makes you think they knew they have bigger problems.
From a technical perspective this things is really interesting. Building a custom ASIC sounds like a massive investment, which is probably part of why it was so expensive. Computational photography was just not ready at the time, but I wonder how it would turne out if Apple or Samsung used modern algorithms and engineering to build a camera like that today.
Would probably be amazing. It was too ahead of its time back then. And even something more simple like a Micro 4/3s sized camera with computational photography using modern algorithms would be very amazing to see.
It will never be as good as a proper optical lens. It's all a bunch of bs, only usable by amateurs. A pro doesn't want some software black box taking creative control over a picture.
@@miskatonic6210the camera wasn't designed for professionals It's meant for hobbyists and ametuers who want something as portable and convenient as a smartphone with a much better camera Not everything is designed for professionals
It's really unfortunate too. I wanted one of these to do video, but eventually determined it wouldn't really work that well. I do wish somebody today would create a camera that is small and thin like the Light camera and use multiple sensors. Basically, something that is NOT a smartphone but a dedicated camera with a card reader. But, it would need to have similar quality to the multi-sensor smart phones we already have. and have a TRIPOD MOUNT!!!!!
You wouldn’t expect the founders to be doing the engineering. It’s their role to understand how to run the company, not code the software and design the hardware.
@@definitelyabot But this is not a smartphone, it's a camera, so it's going to have to compete with cameras. All the way in 2006 you'd easily get a flat compact periscope-lens zoom compact with 6MP which well that's not a lot of megapixels but the colour they do is WONDERFUL compared to this mess, and they're quick too, and all it would cost you is maybe $200. I still use a Pentax Optio W10 from that era, that one is waterproof! If you're wondering how a periscope zoom lens works, look at the promo pictures of Minolta Dimage X, i have a whole zoo of those cameras, a very interesting lens geometry where it's like Tardis, it's bigger on the inside, adequate sensor size (1/2" typical), adequate light performance, all the zoom and focusing movement is internal and the compensation on these lenses is excellent, there is no colour fringing ever. By 2016 the models available are basically almost the same ones you can still get today, with like 14MP 1/2" sensors and there's two manufacturers left Ricoh/Pentax and Nikon i think, but back in the day in 00s everyone was building something similar. Granted they're a good bit more expensive than $200 today but also way way less expensive than $2000. And they're super robust quick and reliable. Now look again at the pictures this one makes and they're no match to even 4MP pictures off a Powershot G2 that i got in 2002 which look like every pixel has got meaning to it. Colour yes but also computational photography failures where there's oversmoothing and overshaprening, you aren't actually getting a great amount of genuine consistent detail. You're pissing all the nominal resolution away if your camera can't even focus, which... well case in point here. That era's bridge Canons throw a super narrow flashlight beam to aid contrast focus. As to smartphones... well i have a Huawei P7 L10 from 2014 here ($330) and i'm not convinced this is much of an improvement either. These photos just do not look good.
@@definitelyabot I find myself regularly surprised by the quality of some of the pictures I can get out of my collection of iPhone 4 and 4S', even compared to my S22 Ultra at times. Neither catch as much detail as my Rebel XTi, but that 2010 iphone sure has some good qualities. This thing falls short of the iphone 4 across the board, if only due to incredible inconsistency in focus and white balance. So it not only falls flat compared to a Note 8 with a steady hand in 2017, but an iphone 4S from seven years prior. Especially for video performance...
I remember when this camera came out. I thought it was a cool concept. I know it failed but I bought this camera in June of this year. It can take incredible photos under certain circumstances, but it severely struggles in low light conditions. What I’ll say is it’s one of my favorite cameras because of how different and unique it is. However, it can never replace an actual DSLR for professional use. One word, lenses. But I do not regret ever getting this camera in June for a cool $180.
I'm a lover of mostly higher-brightness photography, such as car/automotive photography; do you think it might be a fun addition? I have an obsession with taking different types of photos; I already have a new Polaroid camera and a 4000D DSLR and enjoy the variety.
@@Brandonr757sGaming I personally love it for its novelty. Don’t get it expecting it to rival top DLSRs, get it because it’s a cool piece of tech. It’s also a fun conversation starter!
@@Kaldosthesergal Fair; are there any use cases where it might take photos that are visually different/distinctive such that it might have some "usefulness" in some way?
Heh, I think the problem is you can't make this new for the "novelty" price point of $200, which I agree is probably where it needs to be just as a novelty.
I think your chosen charity is a brilliant one. My current pc tower is second hand and cost £90. My Chromebook is second-hand and cost round £140. Most of my clothes and quite a lot of furniture is second-hand - working next door to a charity shop helps - but I grew up next door to a landfill site, so I'm a big fan of recycling and re-purposing, having seen (and smelled) first-hand the consequences of a throwaway society.
I like my shoes a little off..so i splurge online from time to time....aside from that, my electronics (phones, laptops, tv, kitchen wares were all bought used, and I'm happy that way...😊
You can't just take stuff from landfill any more. I took a broken appliance to our local tip last week, and there was a great condition Commodore PET sitting in the shipping container. The guy working there wouldn't let me take it away ;-(
As a working product photographer in London at the time the story began, I was one of the first backers. The concept appealed to me, in a similar way to the Lytro project. I could see that things were not going well though, as the fundraising bulletins were continually obsessing over small technical challenges, not the bigger software issues. There came an opportunity to pull out, which I did. A lot of the work that was done, however, has found its way into many other products and technologies. Apart from unfocused marketing, the thing that killed it was smartphone multi lens cameras, and soon phones will be using AI in their imaging software, so that will start a new era in personal image making.
AI is already finding its way into smartphone image processing. Samsung is the most blatant about it, it will "enhance" the detail if you take a photo of the moon (not a literal replacement of the moon, but they have a neural network trained on pictures of the moon and it will add detail to your photo using that) and the digital zoom shots look like they've been thrown through one of those AI image upscalers. Apple's image processing doesn't go that far, but I wouldn't be surprised if they use a bit of AI for some things considering how they talk about the camera using the Neural Engine.
@@nooneinpart Even on my phone from five years ago or so, I noticed that it was sharpening and brightening close-up text I was photographing to diagnose an electronics issue. Actually very helpful for that. I've had several upgrades since then. My previous phone had four sensors, and my current which just arrived the other day has two larger ones. The new one can do an OK job with night landscape shots, which is a pretty remarkable achievement for something that I got deep-discounted to $20.
But it's not a phone, it's a camera. As such it would need to compete with Pentax Optio WG2/WG3 and Nikon AW130 back in the day. And it would not be a comparison it was going to win. Bloody hell are the photos it makes absolutely hideous!
Trypophobia may also be an evolutionary aversion similar to that most people feel towards spiders or snakes. Instinctively staying the heck away from snakes was an important survival advantage to our ancestors. Trypophobia could be similar aversion towards wasp nests, in fact those trigger trypophobia in some people. For sure there are few things more horrifying than the idea of a wasp nest growing _in_ your back!! Also as you said it may be related to skin conditions, but perhaps in the sense that instinctively avoiding people with drastic skin diseases is a survival advantage.
This makes sense. The tryophobaia doesn't bother me nearly as much in something like that phone than in nature because something deep in my head says "ok that's safe. It's just plastic, it's designed that way" but in nature its just huge alarm bells and a feeling of disgust. Like some bug is burrowed into it. I don't feel itchy, it's almost nausea for me and just extreme uncomfortable feeling. In something purposely made that way I feel that way for a brief second but my "oh it's that way for a reason" comes in fast. If not I immediately expect grossness
My parents once had a lot of mud daubers living under their porch, and they created quite a horrifying mess of irregular holes in the dirt all along the length of the porch. It always triggers my trypophobia if I accidentally happen to get a good look under their porch.
Also infection and decay. Holes can looks like worms or maggots have eaten into something. Doubly so for ones like lotus blossom, where you have the pod part looking very "maggot like" in that context. Throwing that onto a body part screams, "STAY AWAY! THAT PERSON IS DISEASED! YOU WILL GET SICK!!!" in the primitive, instinct parts of our brains.
Was about to comment this exact same thing. Most (if not all) of human fear/disgust responses have formed over time out of of necessity for survival. Height, animals and such are rational fears and fear of beehive or bunch of larvae inside the skin are a very good reasons to stay away. Those who stay away, survive more often. Repeat many million times and you have born innate response to possibly dangerous situation! Making fake typtophobia pictures have existed at least from about early 2000's with the famous 'larvae breast' so it's not a new thing. There is a Snopes article debunking it with background info.
Anyone whom has had their wife berate them for bringing their DSLR to Six Flags understands what these men were trying to achieve. Wife: “NO! I am not holding that damn thing while you get on Viper!”
@@ashishkumawat6110 Yes, people love a good fake story about how a product was conceived, but my example is a true story. I always bring my camera on vacations and the wife can’t understand why I need my DSLR strapped around my shoulder when I have a decent enough iPhone camera in my pocket. But you haven’t lived unless you shoot in RAW!
"HOW DO YOU CLOSE A BEAN?!" is going in my list of favorite sentences. This honestly seems like a really cool product, and I'm sure it had the potential to be something great. I personally am interested to see how the multiple cameras on the S23 Ultra perform once I get mine.
Did you update the firmware? The official servers are down but someone on XDA got a copy of the latest version and doing a offline update drastically improved the experience for me. Also, I find the camera to work best for wide shots of larger scenes, such as landscape, instead of close up subjects.
I'm a lover of mostly higher-brightness photography, such as car/automotive photography; do you think it might be a fun addition? I have an obsession with taking different types of photos; I already have a new Polaroid camera and a 4000D DSLR and enjoy the variety.
I had one of these at launch. I had a buddy on the creative board so I got an even larger discount (I think I ended up getting it for $700?). my first unit was DOA and after some trouble shooting and several calls with their customer support team, we opted to swap it for a new unit. the second one worked no real issues. I tested it by taking pictures of my gunpla kits at the time. I tried using lights and bounce boards, but the photos still came out underwhelming. I would eventually shelve it and end up selling it at a loss.
They have a bunch of these cameras for sale on eBay, some new in box, in the $150 to $180 range. I can see die hard camera collectors picking one of these up for that price as this oddity will certainly become a collectors item. It's definitely unique.
@@metaljack866 Some people are enthusiastic enough to rebuild things with a fresh cell. Or just extract the cell and leave the item safe against accidents but non-functioning on the shelf. Look the photos it makes are hideous anyway, it has no utilitarian value, it is only a unique item.
@@metaljack866 I've been thinking of picking up some mid 2000s digicams for cheap. I already have some good items including a very unique Sanyo from the 90s. Half of my cameras died the SONY sensor plague of 2004. These things can be lots of fun. I'm not the sort of collector to strive for this one but there are people out there who are into all sorts of failed shit even the Nintendo Virtual Boy.
Always glad to help with researching this episode! Here's a couple other tidbits regarding the Light L16 that weren't mentioned: - The Light L16 claimed to offer 4K video recording capability at all three focal lengths according to the box, but that feature never shipped with the product when it first came out-a software update from November of 2018 did add video recording, but it was "beta" and was limited to 1080p at certain focal lengths. Since Light never delivered on their promise of 4K video, you could technically call this false advertising. - Speaking of software updates, the Light L16 and Lumen had plenty of missing features when it first came out, and Light knew that. For example, at launch, the camera had no burst mode, no face detection, no priority modes, no on-device editing tools, etc-software updates from 2017 to 2018 added those features later on.
I feel like a part of the problem with this device is that it was trying to solve was how to achieve multiple focal lengths on a phone, and it came out just as multi-camera phones were becoming mainstream. That served only to make the already ridiculous backside of the camera seem even more comical a solution.
I have a friend who bought one of these when they first came out. He was always talking about how it would replace his Canons. I remember the day he got it. He went out to do some street shooting like a kid with a new toy. Not long after that he went straight back to his Canons. I asked about his new camera. All he would say was "I don't want to talk about it".
That price for a camera that didn't even survive long enough to get newer versions of it make the prices of our iPhones and Samsung Galaxys (or any other phone in this price range or lower) sound reasonable. (Even if we're only getting 3-5 lenses on our phones.) At least in the phone we get improvements regardless of how big or small they are.
I usually skip sponsorships etc, but your charity sounds amazing and I want to commend you for preventing waste and, more importantly, helping those in need.
The sensors are so small. A micro 4/3rds is alot better. I shoot mostly with Canon crop frame dslrs and a mirrorless R7. I don't even own any L glass and mmy photos ate pretty shop Nice 7D by the way. You should get the R7 it's awesome.
This is a case where the hardware was so bleeding edge that the software/processing couldn't keep up. I think the camera has massive potential and now with the processing closer to what may be required for this to work, this concept may show excellent improvement.
By 2016, Huawei was doing computational multi-sensor photography in the P9, but more sensibly, with two sensors with the same focal length and aperture. By the time the L16 died, they were on their third generation product using the same system. The very next year, they went with simpler single sensor computational photography, with minimal cross-sensor input, because it just made more sense. People wanted faster output, and making them wait much longer for marginally better photos didn't make sense.
Relating to the trypophopia: When I was a little kid - we had a very old garage with a metal flood light attached on one side. Wasps would always build their nest in it. I would literally avoid going on that side of the garage purely because of the abandoned paper nest 🫣 Those nightmarish camera cutouts are the sole reason I remember the L16.
a yes wasp nests, even dead they also freak me out, i got several paper was nest around the garage and a few mud dabbers in the garage (luckily they play solo and dont bug me as much as the hords of aholes with wings from the outside)
Man, I love your content. Just came across you for the first time this afternoon and have already binge-watched this and several other videos. I love the way you go in-depth to the tech but in a way that is really helpful and clear for the lay-person like me. I was particularly interested in how Light got on, so this is a fascinating watch!
I got my Light L16 for $1400, iirc. It updated over time, and it unlocked features as they improved. To compensate for the delay in shipping, they increased the internal storage space by 500GB. I sent a question to them in email way back when, and they told me the two buttons on the top right would be updated later for use in zoom control. It's a trackpad-like surface, so you can slide across it to adjust the zoom or you can just tap one or the other. They never officially got it working, though.
Thanks for the warning before those icky photos. I absolutely hate them. They don't make me itch it's just a grossed out feeling. It doesn't bother me nearly as much if its in something like the phone, its not natural and my brain can work out it was designed that way, but in nature or if its supposed to look "natural" something in my brain just screams "this is not right. This is not correct. Run"
Uncanny valley is the name for this, its why people don't like clowns and why almost photorealistic characters in video games look somewhat unsettling. I think its because our fight or flight response is tuned to spot anything that appears natural but looks a bit `off` as a potential threat. A preprogrammed subconscious response to camouflaged or hidden/disguised predators. A clown appears human but the face is wrong or that npc looks like a human running but the arms aren't moving quite right etc.
I was sold when I found out that Human I-T works with Appalachian communities. The most under served communities in the country. That's some good stuff.
Interesting idea. Reminds me of the pre smartphone times, when cellphone manufacturers started adding cameras to their phones and some company (maybe canon, don't remember) tried to make a digital camera that also would double as a phone... but it also didn't get far
Great work! I have just bought a light L16 for £125 so nice to learn all about it in your video. Looking forward to playing around with the camera to see what it can do!
*It's amazing what succeeds in crowdfunding in light of people with all the degrees, all the experience and sometimes billion-dollar resource only for their gadgets to fail.* The Ghostbusters board game generated *millions of dollars* from crowd funding lol. Even recycled products with no significant changes succeed to shocking levels.
I wouldn't be surprised if the way they implemented the video encoding is by using a software-based video encoder running at the fastest preset possible because the ASIC is only made to process photos/is not fast enough for real-time video processing and there needs to be extra headroom on the CPU for video processing (which is also nerfed because there needs to be headroom for video encoding). There's gotta be no way it's using the Snapdragon 820's hardware video encoder, the compression looks terrible compared to other phones from 2015 with the SD820. Or maybe they misconfigured it and made it only use I-frames or something. Meaning every single frame is saved as a whole image instead of only saving the differences between frames, that will either bloat your bitrate really quick or make video quality take a nosedive. Pro video editors supposedly prefer video codecs that are I-frame only (like ProRes, but that uses much more than 20MBPS because it's meant to be an master/intermediate codec, so it needs to be visually identical to the raw footage), so maybe that's what they were going for but they didn't get around to raising the bitrate above 20MBPS. I've heard that it's much faster to edit because jumping across clips is much faster when your computer doesn't have to decode multiple adjacent frames to generate the frame you're looking at. 🤷
I love when people say "They spent X$ and still failed, can you believe that?". Of course I can believe it, spending money doesn't bring success. It can help, but plenty of companies/people still need to learn the lesson that burning money doesn't magically make your shit not stink, just ask Disney. Edit: Seems a lot of their problems boil down to their software. Would be the reason the autofocus and such doesn't work, could also impact performance when shooting/video'ing due to all the computations it has to do behind the scenes to get the right picture settings and such as well.
Great review but this camera pissed me off so bad I had to rage quit the video right after you demoed the video mode. I'll watch the rest once my blood pressure drops.
I'm very new too, and not very good at photography, but like, half the reason I like my DSLR is that it's nice to use mechanically. It feels nice, the controls are nice and intuitive and easy to use. vs my phone where I push a button and the photo appears and i don't get to fiddle with any nice controls or control anything without going into a couple of menus and fiddling with annoying sliders on a touch screen. This seems way closer to a smartphone in terms of that kind of experience which makes it really unappealing imo.
You can't just go "you know, I BET we could make a phone take DSLR-like pics if only we threw more tiny cameras and some software at it!", because this is what happens. First you either have a tech demo that can demonstrably do something nothing else can, or just forget about the whole thing.
Am I seeing this right? 40 something THOUSAND views and more than 300 comments and ONLY 27 likes?? Come on people some support to the guy after all this effort
Great idea just way too early to be implemented successfully. This is basically how all modern multi-sensor smartphone works, but back then I think the processor just wasn’t fast enough and AI image processing algorithms have improved a ton since then.
I was wanting to buy one of these when I remembered out of the blue that these existed today. This makes me not want to waste the money. It's cool, a nice talking piece, and is super interesting. But not trying to spend $150 on that, when that could get me some actually useful useful gear. Thanks for the review!
Had the Nokia 9 and it sounds like just 5 cameras worked better. Although I did find you'd have to take a couple of short to get the right focus or depth of field. Although for the time. I did find it as a very good phone camera for the time. Most of the time. Even if it was licking in megapixels for 2018.
OK. So at the time that this was released, we had the iPhone 7 and the Samsung S7. We also had the first Google pixel I believe. As far as anyone is concerned, this camera being able to take the raw images that it did was far more advanced than any cell phone camera out there. Even in 2023, my main shooter on my current phone is only 48 megapixels. So I guess where I sit with this comment is this. Was this technology better when it first came out and now it has just aged? Or did they abandon the project too early before they could get the software that was running light to work better? I’m assuming they didn’t make any updates after 2018 after some sort of massive failure with the camera and decided to just abandon the project.
Even the new super dupper iPhone 15 Pro Max is only capable of capture a high quality RAW video today, 2023, using an external storage unit, the software is not capable to store all that data while making it at the same time. The Verge showed a really good video about the new iPhone camera problems, and I think the problem with Light, apart this horrible and nightmare fuel looking, was to be way ahead of its time. The ISAC that cause the delays should be thought to be solution of this problems at that time, but it was way too beyond they. Hey, Crazy, great video, thanks and congratulations for your charity action. I hope something like that happens here in Brazil.
Incorrect, iphone does not shoot raw video, and incorrect, the feature you're referring to is not limited to external storage, external storage is a quality of life feature but the phone is capable of recording in the same quality internally.
@@definingslawek4731 You can’t shoot 4k60 ProRes Log internally with the camera app. You have to connect external storage. Apps like Black Magic get around that limitation though.
I was sooooo hyped about this product, then i saw the price, and it was out of my range. few years later, i see this review. I'm releived to see that i didn't lose anything by not buying it the first place. I do find them on secondary marked farily cheap. Now i see why. Very comprehensive and toroughly made review
The device certainly comes across as a concept demonstrator rather than an actual product. It is a pity that the first (and only) iteration wasn’t more refined, because the idea is good. The lacklustre first product didn’t inspire enough confidence in the concept. I was especially surprised to hear that there was no card slots or utility shoe. I would have loved to see a second generation, but then again, many of the concepts main selling points migrated onto modern phones, and they do really good these days. And after hearing that all went well for the guys who came up with the thing, it is hard to not just look at the L16 and say “That was an interesting idea” and then check ones pocket and realise that you are likely to find some sort of variation on the theme there. Nice retrospective!
I just wanted to thank you for the trypophobia warning and bell . As a person who nearly vomits on these kind of things online , it’s very nice to see you go the extra mile . Thank you !
Hey I have one of these and use it often for marketing and advertisement images. It's a really good camera for what I use it for and in decent light as long as you are a bit careful with focus and holding it steady it delivers fantastic quality images with great DOF from the Lumen software. Yes, the software is terribly clunky, the low light performance is rough, and the images from computational photography calculations can fail sometimes. But it's easy to throw in a pocket and get much better images than my phone, and I suppose that was the point.
@@ninjak13 to be fair, no, I paid $150 on ebay. I understand price is a big component of perceived value, and I may not feel the same at $1600... But all digital cameras are of limited longterm value so meh.
That's a lot of compromising for very little payoff. Did you buy this with your own money or was it a gift? Because if it's the former, I'd be very pissed that I paid four figures on a device that I have to handle with kid gloves, as opposed to running to Best Buy and picking up a thin Canon or an Olympus.
I picked one up on Amazon for $130 just to have one as I wanted one when they came out. Honestly it's not all that bad especially when you run through photos though Lightroom
All this bashing. The new prototype camera is compared against established DSLRs which were developed and perfected over many many years. What do you expect from new concept first release camera which operates a very complex system. If they were allowed to develop their product over several decades and improve with each new model, just like DSLRs did, the final version of the product would be more interesting.
Is that the standard American pronunciation of trypophobia? In the UK it's pronounced trip-uh-phobia. Not saying you're wrong, just curious that's all. Edit: I experience trypophobia badly enough that even thinking of such images will cause my face to itch incessantly, so yes I looked away for the warnings, and I thank you providing a warning, much appreciated. I believe it may be a result of an evolutionary process for us to avoid diseases, but I'm no expert on that, I just know it makes my face itch like crazy, so it's very real indeed.
Finally someone that mentions that trypophobia isn't recognized as an actual disorder or phobia. Even though you give the concept more credence than I do, I have to commend you for pointing that bit out.
This reinforces what I learned with the first digital camera I used. A 640x480, noisy jpeg camera. I would take multiple shots and then bring them to Photoshop to experiment. What did I learn? No processing can outdo a big sensor with a good lens. I did learn a few tricks to squeeze more quality out of a camera though, tricks that I can still apply to current day, amazing quality cameras!
Good idea, terrible execution. Also, I'm glad to see that you're still using the 2013 MBP. Many tech TH-camrs buy new tech every year, even though their old one is still good.
I remember seeing a guy who had this camera and I was jaw-dropped when he told me it was 2,000 bucks. I originally thought that it meant that it was worth the money, but seeing all buggy and "barebones" the camera was...yeaaah I'm glad I stuck to my phone cameras before I got my Rebel T7.
Ugggg. You’re lucky to have this camera. I never got my preorder or a refund. I’m still sour about this to my core. This camera was the one and only time I’ve ever preordered a product. Got burned bad.
Not to drizzle salt on your wound, but you know there are ways to get your money back when you pay for something that you don't receive, right? Unless you paid in crypto or literally mailed cash, you mail or phone your payment provider and have them reverse the charge.
This camera wasn't a failure. This is the reason why mobile phone manufacturers thought of having multiple cameras in a mobile phone. This was the pioneer.
I loved this deep dive of the L16. I remember when they came out and were the talk of the town. It was such a neat idea in theory. I had no idea that you were a photography nut. Hoping we get to see more of these types of videos.
I bought one on the cheap, and when you play to its strengths, it's a really fun piece of kit. It's like having a pocketable medium-format film camera. It certainly did not live up to its hype, and the $2000 price tag was just too steep. But the things it does well (such as architectural photography in good light), it does really well. Oddly, the Windows version of Lumen DOES reorient the pictures for portrait vs. landscape upon importing them.
I feel the original prototype design had a LOT more potential than the eventual designs they went with. 1 large main sensor with a few auxiliary sensors surrounding. What benefit really came from adding so many sensors. At some point there had to be diminishing returns of size vs quantity. Compared to something like a 1+4 setup. You could easily fit 1 main sensor, 4 aux sensors, 2 AF sensors, 2 microphones, and dual LED flash into a square shape. That would give little space wasted and give much more room to make each of those components bigger. It would also make the computational side of it 10x better as you've only got FIVE images to combine vs SIXTEEN.. in a low power ARM processor, along with making the actually programming side exponentially less complex.
Reinventing a product also takes determination and persistence. 10 years ago, professionals spit on mirrorless due to slow focusing, bad battery life and lack of pro features. Sony never backed down and continue to add more in their mirrorless and now, mirrorless is the standard, sony became a big name in the camera industry.
Most people totally underestimate how awesome the photo quality of today's standard smartphones are. I still have a high quality Casio camera with large optical zoom and very good optical image stabilization that has tons of settings you can tweak to get optimized shots under nearly all conditions but most of the time you cannot tell apart which photo was shot with that camera and which photo was shot with my iPhone. Actually most users prefer the iPhone shot, as the automatic image optimization quite often does a better job than me trying to manually fiddle with the camera settings; I'm not a professional photographer after all and quite often it takes me several minutes of trial and error and plenty of test shots to get the decent result I'm looking for, just to find out that when I make a quick shot with my iPhone, it looks almost equally good and I had to set up nothing at all, it was all done by the phone software. Sure, less resolution and less details captured, but at some point you usually scale down the final image to a "normal" resolution anyway and then you end up with pretty much the same result the iPhone got you from the start (I'm not a big fun of storing terabytes of raw image data, which I will never use or even look at ever again in the future). I'm pretty sure with an even better camera than mine and more experience than I have, you can still beat an iPhone camera big time but thanks to smartphones most amateurs today can make photos already on a semi-pro level by just hitting a single button and get way better results than any amateur would have ever gotten 20 years ago with standard consumer equipment. And keep in mind, it's not about perfect results, as no result ever is perfect, it's all about being "good enough" and 98% of the time the quality your current smartphone will give you simply is good enough even by advanced standards. The only reason why I keep using the Casio is because of the optical zoom, that's the one feature that smartphones still lack way behind. Being able to zoom way beyond what my iPhone is even capable of and still getting full image resolution and a decent brightness level is something you don't want to give up.
So they didn't like phone Cameras as they didn't compete with DSLR, and also DSLR were too bulky. So they created something that is worse than both DSLR and MOBILE PHONES.
I'd like to play devil's advocate to your opinion here. I was an Og Backer of this Camera back in the day, and thought, at the time, $1600-1800 was worth the investment for the type of forward thinking technology and the "potential" it had. I had used the L16 from 2017 to 2019 until my battery died. *Note: I killed the battery by leaving it in a Frozen car for a week.* Afterward, when it looked like Light was going under, I picked up 4 of these cameras at a discount for $300 each. I still have them AND still use them regularly in place of my phone and other travel cameras. IMO.... The image quality is damn good actually. Better than you have experienced unfortunately and (Better than MOST 2023 Phones that over process the hell out of an image), IF, you know how to use it and work around its quirks. It has quirks. Its definitely not for people who want images to look robust straight out of camera, because that is not the L16. You have to work at getting the quality you want. It takes effort and a professional knowledge of the L16 to get the best out of it. I was lucky enough to work closely with a few employees of Light itself to help provide feedback. Again, its not for everyone. But I could never discredit this camera as harshly as you have, because it truly has its place in one of the most innovative and strange designs of its time. I mean.... its as close (at the time) to a perfect blend of mechanical/ Optical digital photography and the computational process. Again, just my opinion.
(20:43) I remember hearing about the thing back in the day and thought along the lines of 'Uh… what?!' upon seeing the camera array. (3:46) '65 million dollarbucks' That made immediately think of Bluey.
Use my link ridge.com/computerclan to get up to 30% off through December 20th and enter free to win a Ridge bundle worth $4,000. Video Sponsored by Ridge.
P.S. See you on NOVEMBER 28 at 6:00 PM CST (UTC-6) for Computer Clan Live! Tune in on this channel! Also, enable all notifications with the bell, so you don't miss it! 🔔
Wow You have another sponsor other than Lenoad
I've got all notifications on, but didn't get one for this video. Found you when scrolling down my sub feed. Sort it out TH-cam 😢
I reckon most of the problems would have been fixed with software updates and I guess that was the plan. But the folded
@@theatheisthammer I am not so sure. ASIC is not software upgradable. If the functions performed by the ASIC chip are vital, software upgrade cannot help.
friendly reminder to not call me rocky pie
I was a Light employee for the last three years of the company's life, so the video saddens me (not that it's unfair). All I will say is that it was one of the most enjoyable jobs of my 40 years in software, Dave and Rajiv were great bosses, and almost everyone I worked with was extremely talented and dedicated to making the best product possible. Unfortunately, success requires more than good intentions.
Please tell me!! How do I reset the password. I have one and am completely logged out.
@@charlottekalla1730I have no idea! I worked mainly on the gallery app. Let me ask around some old colleagues. if I get an answer I'll post it here!
Geeks like me are going to keep buying the product guys and gals like you made.
Thanks for the cool tech
Those buttons at 6:12 were supposed to be used as capacitive zooming buttons. They were never programmed to work before light went under.
Is the hardware already there?
@@xluumu it is, it was just never programmed
I figured but why on earth did they not have that ready before shipping? Not like that should have been hard. Short of makes you think they knew they have bigger problems.
its a mouse pad with a right and left click
@@txtpeer5179 It is not. You cannot make reliable vertical movement with small touchpad.
From a technical perspective this things is really interesting. Building a custom ASIC sounds like a massive investment, which is probably part of why it was so expensive. Computational photography was just not ready at the time, but I wonder how it would turne out if Apple or Samsung used modern algorithms and engineering to build a camera like that today.
Would probably be amazing. It was too ahead of its time back then.
And even something more simple like a Micro 4/3s sized camera with computational photography using modern algorithms would be very amazing to see.
It will never be as good as a proper optical lens. It's all a bunch of bs, only usable by amateurs.
A pro doesn't want some software black box taking creative control over a picture.
@@miskatonic6210the camera wasn't designed for professionals
It's meant for hobbyists and ametuers who want something as portable and convenient as a smartphone with a much better camera
Not everything is designed for professionals
It'd probably do incredibly well today, given photography as a hobby is more popular than ever
A custom asic is often used before the finished product can be mass manufactured onto a micro controller. It is also more expensive.
It's really unfortunate too. I wanted one of these to do video, but eventually determined it wouldn't really work that well. I do wish somebody today would create a camera that is small and thin like the Light camera and use multiple sensors. Basically, something that is NOT a smartphone but a dedicated camera with a card reader. But, it would need to have similar quality to the multi-sensor smart phones we already have. and have a TRIPOD MOUNT!!!!!
You mean like the Galaxy Camera?
@@BrunodeSouzaLino but with more lenses
@The8BitGuy but wouldn't a carousel or other storage method of lenses with one sensor be more economical and less wasteful?
@@BrunodeSouzaLinoyeahhhhh, I mean the camera on the galaxy is so good I don't think a thin camera could be that much better.
Buy a spare phone and a BeastDOF grip, problem solved
when you said "these guys are legit" i expected people who understood photography, not a software guy and a network guy
Legit as in not the kickstarter way better cooler type
keep watching past 3 minutes
He means “these guys are legit” as in real people with reputable experience. A lot of products on this series use fake creators with fake back stories
That just got past you
You wouldn’t expect the founders to be doing the engineering. It’s their role to understand how to run the company, not code the software and design the hardware.
It's harsh having spent $2K on a camera that's outclassed by the phone that's in your pocket, even in 2016.
eh 2016 smartphone cameras weren't that good, image quality of this camera was bad by todays standard but still better than 2016 smartphones
@@definitelyabot But this is not a smartphone, it's a camera, so it's going to have to compete with cameras. All the way in 2006 you'd easily get a flat compact periscope-lens zoom compact with 6MP which well that's not a lot of megapixels but the colour they do is WONDERFUL compared to this mess, and they're quick too, and all it would cost you is maybe $200. I still use a Pentax Optio W10 from that era, that one is waterproof! If you're wondering how a periscope zoom lens works, look at the promo pictures of Minolta Dimage X, i have a whole zoo of those cameras, a very interesting lens geometry where it's like Tardis, it's bigger on the inside, adequate sensor size (1/2" typical), adequate light performance, all the zoom and focusing movement is internal and the compensation on these lenses is excellent, there is no colour fringing ever. By 2016 the models available are basically almost the same ones you can still get today, with like 14MP 1/2" sensors and there's two manufacturers left Ricoh/Pentax and Nikon i think, but back in the day in 00s everyone was building something similar. Granted they're a good bit more expensive than $200 today but also way way less expensive than $2000. And they're super robust quick and reliable.
Now look again at the pictures this one makes and they're no match to even 4MP pictures off a Powershot G2 that i got in 2002 which look like every pixel has got meaning to it. Colour yes but also computational photography failures where there's oversmoothing and overshaprening, you aren't actually getting a great amount of genuine consistent detail. You're pissing all the nominal resolution away if your camera can't even focus, which... well case in point here. That era's bridge Canons throw a super narrow flashlight beam to aid contrast focus.
As to smartphones... well i have a Huawei P7 L10 from 2014 here ($330) and i'm not convinced this is much of an improvement either. These photos just do not look good.
@@definitelyabot I find myself regularly surprised by the quality of some of the pictures I can get out of my collection of iPhone 4 and 4S', even compared to my S22 Ultra at times.
Neither catch as much detail as my Rebel XTi, but that 2010 iphone sure has some good qualities. This thing falls short of the iphone 4 across the board, if only due to incredible inconsistency in focus and white balance.
So it not only falls flat compared to a Note 8 with a steady hand in 2017, but an iphone 4S from seven years prior. Especially for video performance...
@@definitelyabot Hey, in 2016 Google Pixel's camera was amazing
@@definitelyabot you had the og Pixel and the iPhone 7+ in 2016 and they were p good
I remember when this camera came out. I thought it was a cool concept. I know it failed but I bought this camera in June of this year. It can take incredible photos under certain circumstances, but it severely struggles in low light conditions.
What I’ll say is it’s one of my favorite cameras because of how different and unique it is. However, it can never replace an actual DSLR for professional use. One word, lenses. But I do not regret ever getting this camera in June for a cool $180.
I'm a lover of mostly higher-brightness photography, such as car/automotive photography; do you think it might be a fun addition? I have an obsession with taking different types of photos; I already have a new Polaroid camera and a 4000D DSLR and enjoy the variety.
my sentiments exactly. I got a hold of one of these for $200 a couple of years ago and I'd saw it was worth it.
@@Brandonr757sGaming I personally love it for its novelty. Don’t get it expecting it to rival top DLSRs, get it because it’s a cool piece of tech. It’s also a fun conversation starter!
@@Kaldosthesergal Fair; are there any use cases where it might take photos that are visually different/distinctive such that it might have some "usefulness" in some way?
Heh, I think the problem is you can't make this new for the "novelty" price point of $200, which I agree is probably where it needs to be just as a novelty.
I think your chosen charity is a brilliant one. My current pc tower is second hand and cost £90. My Chromebook is second-hand and cost round £140. Most of my clothes and quite a lot of furniture is second-hand - working next door to a charity shop helps - but I grew up next door to a landfill site, so I'm a big fan of recycling and re-purposing, having seen (and smelled) first-hand the consequences of a throwaway society.
Poopy
Poopy
I also buy "e-waste" and repurpose it for either myself or for resell.
I like my shoes a little off..so i splurge online from time to time....aside from that, my electronics (phones, laptops, tv, kitchen wares were all bought used, and I'm happy that way...😊
You can't just take stuff from landfill any more. I took a broken appliance to our local tip last week, and there was a great condition Commodore PET sitting in the shipping container. The guy working there wouldn't let me take it away ;-(
As a working product photographer in London at the time the story began, I was one of the first backers. The concept appealed to me, in a similar way to the Lytro project. I could see that things were not going well though, as the fundraising bulletins were continually obsessing over small technical challenges, not the bigger software issues. There came an opportunity to pull out, which I did. A lot of the work that was done, however, has found its way into many other products and technologies. Apart from unfocused marketing, the thing that killed it was smartphone multi lens cameras, and soon phones will be using AI in their imaging software, so that will start a new era in personal image making.
AI is already finding its way into smartphone image processing. Samsung is the most blatant about it, it will "enhance" the detail if you take a photo of the moon (not a literal replacement of the moon, but they have a neural network trained on pictures of the moon and it will add detail to your photo using that) and the digital zoom shots look like they've been thrown through one of those AI image upscalers. Apple's image processing doesn't go that far, but I wouldn't be surprised if they use a bit of AI for some things considering how they talk about the camera using the Neural Engine.
@@nooneinpart Even on my phone from five years ago or so, I noticed that it was sharpening and brightening close-up text I was photographing to diagnose an electronics issue. Actually very helpful for that.
I've had several upgrades since then. My previous phone had four sensors, and my current which just arrived the other day has two larger ones. The new one can do an OK job with night landscape shots, which is a pretty remarkable achievement for something that I got deep-discounted to $20.
But it's not a phone, it's a camera. As such it would need to compete with Pentax Optio WG2/WG3 and Nikon AW130 back in the day. And it would not be a comparison it was going to win. Bloody hell are the photos it makes absolutely hideous!
Not gonna lie, I was blown away when I saw the camera actually looked like that! Not just a thumbnail edit..
Trypophobia may also be an evolutionary aversion similar to that most people feel towards spiders or snakes. Instinctively staying the heck away from snakes was an important survival advantage to our ancestors. Trypophobia could be similar aversion towards wasp nests, in fact those trigger trypophobia in some people. For sure there are few things more horrifying than the idea of a wasp nest growing _in_ your back!! Also as you said it may be related to skin conditions, but perhaps in the sense that instinctively avoiding people with drastic skin diseases is a survival advantage.
This makes sense. The tryophobaia doesn't bother me nearly as much in something like that phone than in nature because something deep in my head says "ok that's safe. It's just plastic, it's designed that way" but in nature its just huge alarm bells and a feeling of disgust. Like some bug is burrowed into it. I don't feel itchy, it's almost nausea for me and just extreme uncomfortable feeling. In something purposely made that way I feel that way for a brief second but my "oh it's that way for a reason" comes in fast. If not I immediately expect grossness
My parents once had a lot of mud daubers living under their porch, and they created quite a horrifying mess of irregular holes in the dirt all along the length of the porch. It always triggers my trypophobia if I accidentally happen to get a good look under their porch.
Also infection and decay. Holes can looks like worms or maggots have eaten into something. Doubly so for ones like lotus blossom, where you have the pod part looking very "maggot like" in that context. Throwing that onto a body part screams, "STAY AWAY! THAT PERSON IS DISEASED! YOU WILL GET SICK!!!" in the primitive, instinct parts of our brains.
I got one for you - a wasp nest growing in your scalp
Was about to comment this exact same thing. Most (if not all) of human fear/disgust responses have formed over time out of of necessity for survival. Height, animals and such are rational fears and fear of beehive or bunch of larvae inside the skin are a very good reasons to stay away. Those who stay away, survive more often. Repeat many million times and you have born innate response to possibly dangerous situation!
Making fake typtophobia pictures have existed at least from about early 2000's with the famous 'larvae breast' so it's not a new thing. There is a Snopes article debunking it with background info.
Anyone whom has had their wife berate them for bringing their DSLR to Six Flags understands what these men were trying to achieve. Wife: “NO! I am not holding that damn thing while you get on Viper!”
These are always fake stories constructed to tell the investors how their hilarious ideas originated and they never want to mention money...
*who
Damn this hits close to home.
@@ashishkumawat6110 Yes, people love a good fake story about how a product was conceived, but my example is a true story. I always bring my camera on vacations and the wife can’t understand why I need my DSLR strapped around my shoulder when I have a decent enough iPhone camera in my pocket. But you haven’t lived unless you shoot in RAW!
@@DanielSmedegaardBuusthank you! I’m glad I’m not the only person bothered by terrible grammar.
Biblically accurate camera. 0:04
"HOW DO YOU CLOSE A BEAN?!" is going in my list of favorite sentences.
This honestly seems like a really cool product, and I'm sure it had the potential to be something great. I personally am interested to see how the multiple cameras on the S23 Ultra perform once I get mine.
Did you update the firmware? The official servers are down but someone on XDA got a copy of the latest version and doing a offline update drastically improved the experience for me. Also, I find the camera to work best for wide shots of larger scenes, such as landscape, instead of close up subjects.
I'm a lover of mostly higher-brightness photography, such as car/automotive photography; do you think it might be a fun addition? I have an obsession with taking different types of photos; I already have a new Polaroid camera and a 4000D DSLR and enjoy the variety.
The sound of cope after you spent so much money on junk
@@iHaveTheDocumentshe probably didn't considering you can buy it for cheap
"quite a freaky little thing isn't it, that's what the doctor said about me when i was born"
ken... you are a frickin' legend
A freaky legend
Wow, he did another self owned joke, so funny, laugh now
I had one of these at launch. I had a buddy on the creative board so I got an even larger discount (I think I ended up getting it for $700?). my first unit was DOA and after some trouble shooting and several calls with their customer support team, we opted to swap it for a new unit. the second one worked no real issues. I tested it by taking pictures of my gunpla kits at the time. I tried using lights and bounce boards, but the photos still came out underwhelming. I would eventually shelve it and end up selling it at a loss.
They have a bunch of these cameras for sale on eBay, some new in box, in the $150 to $180 range. I can see die hard camera collectors picking one of these up for that price as this oddity will certainly become a collectors item. It's definitely unique.
Collectors items with dead rechargeable batteries , not so sure .
@@metaljack866 Some people are enthusiastic enough to rebuild things with a fresh cell. Or just extract the cell and leave the item safe against accidents but non-functioning on the shelf. Look the photos it makes are hideous anyway, it has no utilitarian value, it is only a unique item.
@@SianaGearz I suppose , to me it looks like more old electronics clutter .. not exactly a popular item like Apple II C
@@metaljack866 I've been thinking of picking up some mid 2000s digicams for cheap. I already have some good items including a very unique Sanyo from the 90s. Half of my cameras died the SONY sensor plague of 2004. These things can be lots of fun.
I'm not the sort of collector to strive for this one but there are people out there who are into all sorts of failed shit even the Nintendo Virtual Boy.
@@metaljack866but, an apple ii c is just as much of useless clutter as a light l16
Always glad to help with researching this episode! Here's a couple other tidbits regarding the Light L16 that weren't mentioned:
- The Light L16 claimed to offer 4K video recording capability at all three focal lengths according to the box, but that feature never shipped with the product when it first came out-a software update from November of 2018 did add video recording, but it was "beta" and was limited to 1080p at certain focal lengths. Since Light never delivered on their promise of 4K video, you could technically call this false advertising.
- Speaking of software updates, the Light L16 and Lumen had plenty of missing features when it first came out, and Light knew that. For example, at launch, the camera had no burst mode, no face detection, no priority modes, no on-device editing tools, etc-software updates from 2017 to 2018 added those features later on.
The 4K on the box totally shocked me, haha. They were biting off more than they could chew.
I feel like a part of the problem with this device is that it was trying to solve was how to achieve multiple focal lengths on a phone, and it came out just as multi-camera phones were becoming mainstream. That served only to make the already ridiculous backside of the camera seem even more comical a solution.
I have a friend who bought one of these when they first came out. He was always talking about how it would replace his Canons. I remember the day he got it. He went out to do some street shooting like a kid with a new toy. Not long after that he went straight back to his Canons. I asked about his new camera. All he would say was "I don't want to talk about it".
That price for a camera that didn't even survive long enough to get newer versions of it make the prices of our iPhones and Samsung Galaxys (or any other phone in this price range or lower) sound reasonable. (Even if we're only getting 3-5 lenses on our phones.)
At least in the phone we get improvements regardless of how big or small they are.
Well said : )
I usually skip sponsorships etc, but your charity sounds amazing and I want to commend you for preventing waste and, more importantly, helping those in need.
The sensors are so small. A micro 4/3rds is alot better. I shoot mostly with Canon crop frame dslrs and a mirrorless R7. I don't even own any L glass and mmy photos ate pretty shop
Nice 7D by the way. You should get the R7 it's awesome.
This is a case where the hardware was so bleeding edge that the software/processing couldn't keep up. I think the camera has massive potential and now with the processing closer to what may be required for this to work, this concept may show excellent improvement.
I mean
We already did with newer phone anyway. It's 2024, lots of thing happen
By 2016, Huawei was doing computational multi-sensor photography in the P9, but more sensibly, with two sensors with the same focal length and aperture. By the time the L16 died, they were on their third generation product using the same system.
The very next year, they went with simpler single sensor computational photography, with minimal cross-sensor input, because it just made more sense. People wanted faster output, and making them wait much longer for marginally better photos didn't make sense.
Biblically accurate camera.
Relating to the trypophopia: When I was a little kid - we had a very old garage with a metal flood light attached on one side. Wasps would always build their nest in it. I would literally avoid going on that side of the garage purely because of the abandoned paper nest 🫣
Those nightmarish camera cutouts are the sole reason I remember the L16.
a yes wasp nests, even dead they also freak me out, i got several paper was nest around the garage and a few mud dabbers in the garage (luckily they play solo and dont bug me as much as the hords of aholes with wings from the outside)
Seems more likely that you were afraid of the wasps, not their nests.
Those founders are resilient. They just counted the L and kept it moving on to other things immediately.
Man, I love your content. Just came across you for the first time this afternoon and have already binge-watched this and several other videos. I love the way you go in-depth to the tech but in a way that is really helpful and clear for the lay-person like me. I was particularly interested in how Light got on, so this is a fascinating watch!
I got my Light L16 for $1400, iirc. It updated over time, and it unlocked features as they improved. To compensate for the delay in shipping, they increased the internal storage space by 500GB. I sent a question to them in email way back when, and they told me the two buttons on the top right would be updated later for use in zoom control. It's a trackpad-like surface, so you can slide across it to adjust the zoom or you can just tap one or the other. They never officially got it working, though.
13:19 You should have given us a comparison of a good dynamic range image compared to the L16's image dynamic range so I can see it for my own eyes.
Thanks for the warning before those icky photos. I absolutely hate them. They don't make me itch it's just a grossed out feeling. It doesn't bother me nearly as much if its in something like the phone, its not natural and my brain can work out it was designed that way, but in nature or if its supposed to look "natural" something in my brain just screams "this is not right. This is not correct. Run"
Uncanny valley is the name for this, its why people don't like clowns and why almost photorealistic characters in video games look somewhat unsettling. I think its because our fight or flight response is tuned to spot anything that appears natural but looks a bit `off` as a potential threat. A preprogrammed subconscious response to camouflaged or hidden/disguised predators.
A clown appears human but the face is wrong or that npc looks like a human running but the arms aren't moving quite right etc.
I was sold when I found out that Human I-T works with Appalachian communities. The most under served communities in the country. That's some good stuff.
Interesting idea. Reminds me of the pre smartphone times, when cellphone manufacturers started adding cameras to their phones and some company (maybe canon, don't remember) tried to make a digital camera that also would double as a phone... but it also didn't get far
Great work! I have just bought a light L16 for £125 so nice to learn all about it in your video. Looking forward to playing around with the camera to see what it can do!
How's it?
this is so amazing technology , i wish they develop it to match the latest cameras technology
*It's amazing what succeeds in crowdfunding in light of people with all the degrees, all the experience and sometimes billion-dollar resource only for their gadgets to fail.* The Ghostbusters board game generated *millions of dollars* from crowd funding lol. Even recycled products with no significant changes succeed to shocking levels.
I wouldn't be surprised if the way they implemented the video encoding is by using a software-based video encoder running at the fastest preset possible because the ASIC is only made to process photos/is not fast enough for real-time video processing and there needs to be extra headroom on the CPU for video processing (which is also nerfed because there needs to be headroom for video encoding). There's gotta be no way it's using the Snapdragon 820's hardware video encoder, the compression looks terrible compared to other phones from 2015 with the SD820.
Or maybe they misconfigured it and made it only use I-frames or something. Meaning every single frame is saved as a whole image instead of only saving the differences between frames, that will either bloat your bitrate really quick or make video quality take a nosedive. Pro video editors supposedly prefer video codecs that are I-frame only (like ProRes, but that uses much more than 20MBPS because it's meant to be an master/intermediate codec, so it needs to be visually identical to the raw footage), so maybe that's what they were going for but they didn't get around to raising the bitrate above 20MBPS. I've heard that it's much faster to edit because jumping across clips is much faster when your computer doesn't have to decode multiple adjacent frames to generate the frame you're looking at. 🤷
I love when people say "They spent X$ and still failed, can you believe that?". Of course I can believe it, spending money doesn't bring success. It can help, but plenty of companies/people still need to learn the lesson that burning money doesn't magically make your shit not stink, just ask Disney.
Edit: Seems a lot of their problems boil down to their software. Would be the reason the autofocus and such doesn't work, could also impact performance when shooting/video'ing due to all the computations it has to do behind the scenes to get the right picture settings and such as well.
The heads up and heads up bell about those images was a win thank you ken
My pleasure! I hoped some would appreciate that.
@@ComputerClan I second that, I did look away so thank you so much for the warnings, having an itchy face is not fun.
Great review but this camera pissed me off so bad I had to rage quit the video right after you demoed the video mode. I'll watch the rest once my blood pressure drops.
Ah, a biblically accurate Camera 😅
I'm very new too, and not very good at photography, but like, half the reason I like my DSLR is that it's nice to use mechanically. It feels nice, the controls are nice and intuitive and easy to use. vs my phone where I push a button and the photo appears and i don't get to fiddle with any nice controls or control anything without going into a couple of menus and fiddling with annoying sliders on a touch screen. This seems way closer to a smartphone in terms of that kind of experience which makes it really unappealing imo.
Not only are you a great presenter, I extremely appreciate the trypophobia warnings and how you are inclusive!! Subscribed!
You can't just go "you know, I BET we could make a phone take DSLR-like pics if only we threw more tiny cameras and some software at it!", because this is what happens. First you either have a tech demo that can demonstrably do something nothing else can, or just forget about the whole thing.
Love your videos. I so can't wait wait for the next one. You find the most amazing junk you review.
Am I seeing this right? 40 something THOUSAND views and more than 300 comments and ONLY 27 likes?? Come on people some support to the guy after all this effort
Seems they seriously overthought and over engineered an attempt to reinvent the camera and it turned into a huge mess.
I always thought you were a cultured man Ken , but seeing you are indeed a man of culture warms the heart.
Designers: How many cameras and lenses do you need?
Rajiv and Dave: Yes
Thumbnail and Intro contain Biblically Accurate Ken
Great idea just way too early to be implemented successfully. This is basically how all modern multi-sensor smartphone works, but back then I think the processor just wasn’t fast enough and AI image processing algorithms have improved a ton since then.
Now that these are $150 they might be worth a spot in the camera bag.
1:00 It doesn't just sound like a pokemon, it's literally only one letter away from Flareon, an actual pokemon.
I was wanting to buy one of these when I remembered out of the blue that these existed today. This makes me not want to waste the money. It's cool, a nice talking piece, and is super interesting. But not trying to spend $150 on that, when that could get me some actually useful useful gear. Thanks for the review!
Had the Nokia 9 and it sounds like just 5 cameras worked better. Although I did find you'd have to take a couple of short to get the right focus or depth of field. Although for the time. I did find it as a very good phone camera for the time. Most of the time. Even if it was licking in megapixels for 2018.
OK. So at the time that this was released, we had the iPhone 7 and the Samsung S7. We also had the first Google pixel I believe.
As far as anyone is concerned, this camera being able to take the raw images that it did was far more advanced than any cell phone camera out there. Even in 2023, my main shooter on my current phone is only 48 megapixels.
So I guess where I sit with this comment is this. Was this technology better when it first came out and now it has just aged? Or did they abandon the project too early before they could get the software that was running light to work better? I’m assuming they didn’t make any updates after 2018 after some sort of massive failure with the camera and decided to just abandon the project.
Even the new super dupper iPhone 15 Pro Max is only capable of capture a high quality RAW video today, 2023, using an external storage unit, the software is not capable to store all that data while making it at the same time. The Verge showed a really good video about the new iPhone camera problems, and I think the problem with Light, apart this horrible and nightmare fuel looking, was to be way ahead of its time. The ISAC that cause the delays should be thought to be solution of this problems at that time, but it was way too beyond they. Hey, Crazy, great video, thanks and congratulations for your charity action. I hope something like that happens here in Brazil.
Incorrect, iphone does not shoot raw video, and incorrect, the feature you're referring to is not limited to external storage, external storage is a quality of life feature but the phone is capable of recording in the same quality internally.
@@definingslawek4731 You can’t shoot 4k60 ProRes Log internally with the camera app. You have to connect external storage. Apps like Black Magic get around that limitation though.
@@definingslawek4731 I don’t think we are talking about the same iPhone. Did you see that The Verge vídeo about te iPhone 15 recording problems?
Thanks for the warning system. Much appreciated
10:06 🤮 i never seen a deep dish looks this nasty
Yeah… TRUST ME it was way better in person, haha.
I was sooooo hyped about this product, then i saw the price, and it was out of my range.
few years later, i see this review.
I'm releived to see that i didn't lose anything by not buying it the first place.
I do find them on secondary marked farily cheap. Now i see why.
Very comprehensive and toroughly made review
4:20 - Correction, with that device you have 11 shots to make a good first impression.
The device certainly comes across as a concept demonstrator rather than an actual product.
It is a pity that the first (and only) iteration wasn’t more refined, because the idea is good. The lacklustre first product didn’t inspire enough confidence in the concept. I was especially surprised to hear that there was no card slots or utility shoe.
I would have loved to see a second generation, but then again, many of the concepts main selling points migrated onto modern phones, and they do really good these days. And after hearing that all went well for the guys who came up with the thing, it is hard to not just look at the L16 and say “That was an interesting idea” and then check ones pocket and realise that you are likely to find some sort of variation on the theme there.
Nice retrospective!
I just wanted to thank you for the trypophobia warning and bell . As a person who nearly vomits on these kind of things online , it’s very nice to see you go the extra mile . Thank you !
My mom has literally thrown up from the word “cluster”. This is why she ended up not going to med school
Hey I have one of these and use it often for marketing and advertisement images. It's a really good camera for what I use it for and in decent light as long as you are a bit careful with focus and holding it steady it delivers fantastic quality images with great DOF from the Lumen software. Yes, the software is terribly clunky, the low light performance is rough, and the images from computational photography calculations can fail sometimes. But it's easy to throw in a pocket and get much better images than my phone, and I suppose that was the point.
you paid full price?
@@ninjak13 to be fair, no, I paid $150 on ebay. I understand price is a big component of perceived value, and I may not feel the same at $1600... But all digital cameras are of limited longterm value so meh.
That's a lot of compromising for very little payoff. Did you buy this with your own money or was it a gift? Because if it's the former, I'd be very pissed that I paid four figures on a device that I have to handle with kid gloves, as opposed to running to Best Buy and picking up a thin Canon or an Olympus.
Honestly what phone do you have that it takes worse pictures than this thing?
@@definingslawek4731 no phone can touch the image quality from the Light L16 when used properly.
Thank you for discouraging me, it is $150 on Amazon right now, but even that looks like a waste of money.
I picked one up on Amazon for $130 just to have one as I wanted one when they came out. Honestly it's not all that bad especially when you run through photos though Lightroom
Whenever a tech reviewer says "right...RIIIGHT?", it's a sign we're about to go WAY left.
4SHADOWING
All this bashing. The new prototype camera is compared against established DSLRs which were developed and perfected over many many years. What do you expect from new concept first release camera which operates a very complex system. If they were allowed to develop their product over several decades and improve with each new model, just like DSLRs did, the final version of the product would be more interesting.
Is that the standard American pronunciation of trypophobia? In the UK it's pronounced trip-uh-phobia. Not saying you're wrong, just curious that's all.
Edit: I experience trypophobia badly enough that even thinking of such images will cause my face to itch incessantly, so yes I looked away for the warnings, and I thank you providing a warning, much appreciated. I believe it may be a result of an evolutionary process for us to avoid diseases, but I'm no expert on that, I just know it makes my face itch like crazy, so it's very real indeed.
From the same concept of “expensive but useless”, luxury bags at least don’t usually look scary😂
1 million views to donate a $50 chromebook 💀
How many Chromebooks do you donate?
Where are you getting $50 Chromebooks? And it's better than a lot of TH-camrs do
@2:48 "and brought on multiple executives" well I see he problem right there and don't need to listen any further.
Did you update the camera to the last firmware before doing this video, or is it tested straight out of the box?
Finally someone that mentions that trypophobia isn't recognized as an actual disorder or phobia. Even though you give the concept more credence than I do, I have to commend you for pointing that bit out.
That there is a biblically accurate camera.
Did you remember to remove the protective plastic from the front when you bought it?
This reinforces what I learned with the first digital camera I used. A 640x480, noisy jpeg camera. I would take multiple shots and then bring them to Photoshop to experiment.
What did I learn?
No processing can outdo a big sensor with a good lens.
I did learn a few tricks to squeeze more quality out of a camera though, tricks that I can still apply to current day, amazing quality cameras!
I was looking to buy this camera years ago. I'm glad I didn't. Thank you for your review
Good idea, terrible execution.
Also, I'm glad to see that you're still using the 2013 MBP. Many tech TH-camrs buy new tech every year, even though their old one is still good.
I remember seeing a guy who had this camera and I was jaw-dropped when he told me it was 2,000 bucks. I originally thought that it meant that it was worth the money, but seeing all buggy and "barebones" the camera was...yeaaah I'm glad I stuck to my phone cameras before I got my Rebel T7.
Ugggg. You’re lucky to have this camera. I never got my preorder or a refund. I’m still sour about this to my core. This camera was the one and only time I’ve ever preordered a product. Got burned bad.
Not to drizzle salt on your wound, but you know there are ways to get your money back when you pay for something that you don't receive, right?
Unless you paid in crypto or literally mailed cash, you mail or phone your payment provider and have them reverse the charge.
This camera wasn't a failure. This is the reason why mobile phone manufacturers thought of having multiple cameras in a mobile phone. This was the pioneer.
Finally, a biblical accurate camera
pretty impressive for only 65 million in development investments. Guaranteed Google only did it to get their hands on patent rights LOL
Yeah, the doctor must have been quite startled when he saw that humongous head of yours!
They couldn't get me out. 😔
I loved this deep dive of the L16. I remember when they came out and were the talk of the town. It was such a neat idea in theory. I had no idea that you were a photography nut. Hoping we get to see more of these types of videos.
biblically accurate camera
I bought one on the cheap, and when you play to its strengths, it's a really fun piece of kit. It's like having a pocketable medium-format film camera. It certainly did not live up to its hype, and the $2000 price tag was just too steep. But the things it does well (such as architectural photography in good light), it does really well. Oddly, the Windows version of Lumen DOES reorient the pictures for portrait vs. landscape upon importing them.
I feel the original prototype design had a LOT more potential than the eventual designs they went with.
1 large main sensor with a few auxiliary sensors surrounding. What benefit really came from adding so many sensors. At some point there had to be diminishing returns of size vs quantity.
Compared to something like a 1+4 setup. You could easily fit 1 main sensor, 4 aux sensors, 2 AF sensors, 2 microphones, and dual LED flash into a square shape.
That would give little space wasted and give much more room to make each of those components bigger. It would also make the computational side of it 10x better as you've only got FIVE images to combine vs SIXTEEN.. in a low power ARM processor, along with making the actually programming side exponentially less complex.
The miracle is that it even worked with so much complexity
Reinventing a product also takes determination and persistence. 10 years ago, professionals spit on mirrorless due to slow focusing, bad battery life and lack of pro features. Sony never backed down and continue to add more in their mirrorless and now, mirrorless is the standard, sony became a big name in the camera industry.
Most people totally underestimate how awesome the photo quality of today's standard smartphones are. I still have a high quality Casio camera with large optical zoom and very good optical image stabilization that has tons of settings you can tweak to get optimized shots under nearly all conditions but most of the time you cannot tell apart which photo was shot with that camera and which photo was shot with my iPhone. Actually most users prefer the iPhone shot, as the automatic image optimization quite often does a better job than me trying to manually fiddle with the camera settings; I'm not a professional photographer after all and quite often it takes me several minutes of trial and error and plenty of test shots to get the decent result I'm looking for, just to find out that when I make a quick shot with my iPhone, it looks almost equally good and I had to set up nothing at all, it was all done by the phone software. Sure, less resolution and less details captured, but at some point you usually scale down the final image to a "normal" resolution anyway and then you end up with pretty much the same result the iPhone got you from the start (I'm not a big fun of storing terabytes of raw image data, which I will never use or even look at ever again in the future). I'm pretty sure with an even better camera than mine and more experience than I have, you can still beat an iPhone camera big time but thanks to smartphones most amateurs today can make photos already on a semi-pro level by just hitting a single button and get way better results than any amateur would have ever gotten 20 years ago with standard consumer equipment. And keep in mind, it's not about perfect results, as no result ever is perfect, it's all about being "good enough" and 98% of the time the quality your current smartphone will give you simply is good enough even by advanced standards. The only reason why I keep using the Casio is because of the optical zoom, that's the one feature that smartphones still lack way behind. Being able to zoom way beyond what my iPhone is even capable of and still getting full image resolution and a decent brightness level is something you don't want to give up.
So they didn't like phone Cameras as they didn't compete with DSLR, and also DSLR were too bulky.
So they created something that is worse than both DSLR and MOBILE PHONES.
I'd like to play devil's advocate to your opinion here. I was an Og Backer of this Camera back in the day, and thought, at the time, $1600-1800 was worth the investment for the type of forward thinking technology and the "potential" it had. I had used the L16 from 2017 to 2019 until my battery died. *Note: I killed the battery by leaving it in a Frozen car for a week.* Afterward, when it looked like Light was going under, I picked up 4 of these cameras at a discount for $300 each. I still have them AND still use them regularly in place of my phone and other travel cameras. IMO.... The image quality is damn good actually. Better than you have experienced unfortunately and (Better than MOST 2023 Phones that over process the hell out of an image), IF, you know how to use it and work around its quirks. It has quirks. Its definitely not for people who want images to look robust straight out of camera, because that is not the L16. You have to work at getting the quality you want. It takes effort and a professional knowledge of the L16 to get the best out of it. I was lucky enough to work closely with a few employees of Light itself to help provide feedback. Again, its not for everyone. But I could never discredit this camera as harshly as you have, because it truly has its place in one of the most innovative and strange designs of its time. I mean.... its as close (at the time) to a perfect blend of mechanical/ Optical digital photography and the computational process. Again, just my opinion.
you really aren't making it sound good
A compact point and shoot camera sounds like a superior option in my opinion.
8:26 the important part
I like how Ken turned into Melanie Martinez
(20:43) I remember hearing about the thing back in the day and thought along the lines of 'Uh… what?!' upon seeing the camera array.
(3:46) '65 million dollarbucks'
That made immediately think of Bluey.