Light³

One of our neighbours is a retired nurse who, in pre-Covid times, would join cruise ships as an in-house (on-ship? off-shore?) medic, on the understanding that if a passenger got seriously ill and had to disembark she would accompany them to hospital on shore. Usually some ill-favoured backwater like, oh, the Bahamas? But, now that all the cruise liners are permanently moored at various locations off the south coast, like an invasion fleet of sybaritic champagne-vikings, she keeps herself busy by offering dog-walking services, which means finding suitably dog-friendly routes around the neighbourhood. Monday was a beautiful early spring day here in Southampton, bright and cool, so I went for a lengthy walk along part of a new route suggested by her, which takes in the municipal golf course, and a track passing under the motorway I hadn't previously known about. The whole walk circles back within scent-range of a cattery deep in the woods, which strikes me as reckless, from a dog discipline point-of-view.

I took the Light L16 along as a suitably portable photographic companion, and also to get a better sense of its limitations. The three photos here are typical: nice enough, but not outstanding in any of the terms by which we measure the finer points of a photograph, much in the way a dog-show judge assesses the shape of the ears or the hang of the tail of a "best of breed" candidate. Compared to carrying a DSLR equipped with the equivalent of a 28-150 zoom, obviously, there is no contest in terms of portability. In terms of IQ, however, it's nowhere near, and I'm not even sure how well it would stack up against the more recent versions of, say, the Sony RX100, which are clearly best of breed in the portability stakes. And then there are all those latest bright-eyed and bushy-tailed smartphones, snapping and yapping at the heels of this pioneer of computational photography...

So I thought it would be worthwhile to look briefly at the primary objections raised by reviewers and early adopters of the Light L16 (this review is typical, and fair-minded), and give my responses, based on a few weeks of light use.

It's too expensive. True. It was far too expensive at around £2000, but it is no longer offered for sale new at all, and used examples can be had for much less. However, I am always shocked by how much even "affordable" cameras cost when new: the "sub $1000 camera" is a category equalling "cheap" on the review sites. And the latest and greatest smartphones cost even more.

The auto-focus is slow and erratic, and lacks image-stabilisation. True. I think the former was addressed to a certain extent in later software updates, but this is not a camera for sports fans, or anyone trying to record lively dogs or toddlers. But image-stabilisation? On sixteen different sensors simultaneously? Forget about it!

There is no aperture priority mode. True. This is because all sixteen of the phone-style camera units are at a fixed f/2.0 aperture. Which somehow becomes a default f/15 when ten of those images are loaded into the Lumen software and assembled into a single image. A claim I take with an enormous pinch of salt, as my experience of small-sensor cameras at even f/5.6 is that they produce photos that are sharp from front to back – the way I like it – whereas the L16's composited images rarely are. You have to wonder if the designers really understood what "f/15" actually means, in optical terms. There is, after all, a lot of misinformation on the subject of aperture out there.

The files are enormous. Not necessarily true. You can choose to export at 8 MP or 13 MP if you want, which is hardly enormous. OTOH a "full" DNG file at the widest zoom (equivalent to 28mm in 35mm terms [1]) is 80 MP, which is. Quality wise, I see no real difference between my preferred 13 MP exports and their "full" versions. In fact, to my eyes, the smaller files generally look better. If it's high resolution you're after, you need to look elsewhere.

The file size varies according to focal length. True. Why this is the case requires a complex explanation which gives me a headache: it just does, OK? The longest zoom is always 13 MP, even as a "full" file, whereas the widest is usually 80 MP, and the two optimal settings in between (the equivalents of 35mm and 75mm) are 52 MP. Which is weird, but a necessary consequence of the design, apparently. And as so far I have chosen to export everything as a 13 MP file anyway, who cares?

The workflow is clumsy. True. I've already described this in a previous post, so won't again. Other than to say it would be a bit less clumsy done on a single computer, but disk space and processing power mean I have to split the job between a desktop and a laptop. But any workflow adding extra time-consuming steps is not a good thing, unless it delivers superlative quality, unattainable by other means. Which it doesn't.

Lumen is not very good. Not true. It is terrible; truly AWFUL. A grim but necessary step on the road, like that one night in a really bad motel, or crossing some international border at a snail's pace in intense heat in a tiny car with no air-conditioning. This combinational phase of the workflow really did need to be done in-camera, even if it would have imposed a greater processing-power burden. Imagine if a proposed smartphone design offered great imaging capability, but only after uploading the files via a USB cable into some clunky proprietary software, still in beta... The sales team would be checking their calendars: is it April 1st?

The image-stitching is imperfect. True. The seemingly random areas of unsharpness are my main beef with this camera. Everything else can be worked around, but this is a serious flaw. Serious enough that, if I can't figure out a way to deal with it, I will probably write this whole thing off to experience, and stop wasting my time. Typical example:

It's a nice enough picture, until you look more closely. Notice the abrupt change in the sharpness of the grass about two-thirds of the way across in the detailed image? And how the left-hand log is sharp, but has smeared edges, and the right-hand log is soft all over, with the same blurry halo? It's not as if these massive logs were blowing around in the light breeze.

The camera and software are now unsupported. True. Which is a shame if you paid full price for it not so long ago. I suppose that's what comes of buying into some bleeding-edge concept camera from an outfit with no track record: "buyer beware", and all that. I got mildly stung by a Kickstarter enterprise years ago that offered much but delivered little, and decided then to stay well away from tech-optimists flying kites. They rarely set out to defraud or sell anybody short, but when reality bites they tend to cut and run. Light won't even acknowledge the existence of their camera, now, and have since moved on to – yikes! – driverless car technology.

In the end I can't really disagree with or improve upon this review by Albert Lee: The Light L16: brilliant and braindead. His conclusion: "On the upshot, I do have a new found appreciation for how good the cameras I own really are. It’s like returning a terrible rental car and falling back in love with your car, all over again." Indeed. Hey, Fuji darlin', the weather's nice, fancy going for a walk?

What? Oh, the title of this post? It's just a feeble play on Minor White's first collection for Aperture, published in 1968, with the title Light⁷.

1:1 details of the photo above at 13MP and 52MP

(the latter admittedly only partially processed).

Closer to smartphone than DSLR IMHO. And f/15?

1. 35mm focal lengths have become a photographic lingua franca for lenses, which is odd, really, given how few people in 2021 will have ever used a 35mm film camera, or even a so-called "full-frame" digital camera. You'd have thought the actual angle of view would be a more useful way to compare lenses, "75°", say, instead of endlessly repeating "the equivalent of a 28mm lens".