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With a new kind of camera, Lytro wants to remove the headaches of focus from digital photography.

Lytro, a start-up based in the Silicon Valley, hopes to revolutionize the camera industry by bringing "light field" cameras to the market this year. This type of photography captures the color, intensity and direction of individual light rays, allowing the user to refocus the picture even after it has been taken.

Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Lytro's founder and chief executive, Ran Ng, likened the technology to a multitrack audio recording, in which each instrument is recorded separately and mixed later.

A camera that couldn't care less about focus: introducing Lytro

...Lytro is the brainchild of Dr. Ren Ng, a Stanford Ph.D whose dissertation on light-field technology five years ago was showered with awards. Now, with the help of $50 million in funding, most of it from Andreessen Horowitz, Ng has built a company that's preparing to launch a focus-free digital camera later this year.

The basic premise of Lytro's technology is pretty simple: The camera captures all the information it possibly can about the field of light in front of it. You then get a digital photo that is adjustable in an almost infinite number of ways. You can focus anywhere in the picture, change the light levels -- and presuming you're using a device with a 3-D ready screen -- even create a picture you can tilt and shift in three dimensions. (I got a demonstration of the camera's 3-D photos on a laptop and was blown away.)...

Lytro: The camera that could change photography forever

Have you ever taken a picture that would have been great if only it were in focus? Of course you have. So have we, countless times. But those days may soon be past all of us with the introduction of Lytro, an entirely new kind of camera that allows users to completely change the focus of a picture after the shutter clicks. And, according to AllThingsD, this next-generation camera will be available before the end of the year.

A Start-Up’s Camera Lets You Take Shots First and Focus Later

...The Lytro camera captures far more light data, from many angles, than is possible with a conventional camera. It accomplishes that with a special sensor called a microlens array, which puts the equivalent of many lenses into a small space. “That is the heart of the breakthrough,” said Pat Hanrahan, a Stanford professor, who was Mr. Ng’s thesis adviser but is not involved in Lytro.

But the wealth of raw light data comes to life only with sophisticated software that lets a viewer switch points of focus. This allows still photographs to be explored as never before. “They become interactive, living pictures,” Mr. Ng said. He thinks a popular use may be families and friends roaming through different perspectives on pictures of, say, vacations and parties posted on Facebook (Lytro will have a Facebook app)...

5 Coolest Lytro Light Field Camera Features

...If that got you excited about Lytro's potential, here's a look at 5 of the coolest promises Lytro is making about its new cameras.

Focus Later

If you played with the image above, then you saw how an image taken with a Lytro camera will supposedly let you change the focus from a foreground object to a background one or vice versa. But based on the images in Lytro's photo gallery, it appears the technology limits how many different points of focus you can choose by setting up clickable regions on your photo. It's also not clear if Lytro can clean up an image that is fundamentally blurry (a bad photography technique that I have mastered).

No Shutter Lag

Lytro says you can turn on its camera and be ready to take a picture in less than one second...