Overall sound quality was quite respectable. The SuperBeam headphones did a good job with a Metropolitan Opera broadcast; Verdi’s “Aida’’ came across with a rich, satisfying sound. And a recording of my voice made with the boomless microphones made me sound even better than usual. My one complaint is the size of the headphones, which barely fit my rather bulbous head. Still, these boomless devices are a welcome audio innovation.
Lytro light field camera
$399 to $499 at lytro.com
Focus your camera before taking the picture? That’s so 20th century. Behold Lytro, a remarkable little camera that lets you alter the focus of a photograph after you have taken it.
Lytro is the first consumer camera to use a technology called light field photography. It uses an image sensor covered with little lenses. Each of these lenses can capture light from multiple directions, not just straight ahead like the sensors in other digital cameras. As a result, the sensor captures a lot more visual information in each shot.
Throw in some advanced software and the captured light can be reprocessed to dramatically modify pictures you have already taken.
During a tryout of the camera last week, a Lytro official said that future light field cameras would enable all manner of cool stuff, like 3-D images from a single-lens camera. But the first-generation Lytro camera’s claim to fame is variable focus. Say you shoot a picture of a friend standing nearby, but notice something interesting happening over his shoulder. Copy the image to an Apple Macintosh computer (Windows software is coming soon) and you’ll be able to change the focus of the image. Your pal’s face blurs, but the cute passerby in the background is now razor-sharp.
