Fun with Light L16

[darr]

@Godfrey
I grew-up for a time in the Cherry Hill and Haddonfield area. My mother was from Audubon and my father was from Ship Bottom originally.
I am heading up that way in a few weeks to visit family and friends. Its a small world!

I also grew up in Topanga California and have more family in California than NJ.
Maybe we have crossed paths before.

Best to you!

 

[Godfrey]

I grew up in New Rochelle, NY. Moved around a lot during my late 'teens/early 20s, and then settled into remaining in Middle California just as I turned 30. I lived for a time in Pasadena area, while I worked at NASA/JPL, but moved north again when I went to work for Apple. Been here in the SF Bay Area ever since.

I was in Cherry Hill and Haddonfield for a couple of weeks because my friend and acupressure therapist moved there about 18 years ago after she despaired of ever being able to afford a house of her own here in the Bay Area. After last October's car accident, and the consequent shoulder replacement surgery in December, I wrote her asking if she knew another acupressure therapist here that she'd recommend for my therapy.

"Heck with that! Come visit me for two weeks, stay in my house, and I'll get you set up for some sessions...." I didn't hesitate for one second: Rena is the best.

I'd only ever been to Cherry Hill once before ... an old roommate of mine at Fordham University came from there, and I went with him for a weekend's visit to his parents. That was eons ago. But it's a pleasant place, I got to do a lot of walking through the parks and neighborhoods, and went to the Philadelphia for a performance of Carmina Burana at the Philharmonic. The goals of the trip were met, Rena worked her magic on my shoulder and legs, and I'm now feeling like I'm finally 90%+ of the way back to being healed from that cataclysm in October.

Whether we've crossed paths, I dunno. But if you're ever in the San Jose area and have some free time, just let me know and we'll have a meal, a coffee, and a lot of laughs telling stories to each other.

onwards, always onwards!
G

 

[hypothetical]

Is it possible to create stereoscopic pairs from a single shot with this camera? Does one have access to all 16 individual shots after a shutter actuation?

 

[Godfrey]

Is it possible to create stereoscopic pairs from a single shot with this camera? Does one have access to all 16 individual shots after a shutter actuation?

No. ... but perhaps more detail is needed to clarify how the camera and its dedicated software work with respect to the image data and image processing settings.

The Light L16 does have 16 individual cameras. For each exposure, its firmware chooses the 10 most appropriate cameras for the task (based on the current equivalent focal length setting and focus distance); just those ten cameras are triggered for the actual exposure. Their output is encoded into a single, proprietary file per exposure plus a sidecar file that either the internal image processing software or the dedicated Lumen.app application decodes and coalesces together, and outputs to a .DNG file or a finished .JPG file based on what is done with the various apriori and post processing settings you make.

Output from the camera is transferred to computer directly as file pairs of L16_xxxxx.lri (image data) and L16_xxxxx.lris (image settings) with the Lumen application. These image data+settings files can also be output by Lumen as .DNG, .JPEG, or .DNG+.JPEG output files. Output from the camera can also be encoded as JPEG files, and then piped through the SnapSeed application (downloadable and installed on the camera) to output to Flickr and other image file repositories outside the camera.

What the individual cameras' output is recorded as in the proprietary .lri file is hard to say without spending time to deconvolve the file format, which I have not attempted to do.

G

 

[Godfrey]

Went for my walk today and, on the spur of the moment, grabbed my Light L16 to carry with me.

Candy Canes - Santa Clara 2024
Light L16
ISO 162 @ f/15 @ 1/140 sec @ 84.4mm​

I only made a few exposures. This one I processed on the camera with Snapseed and uploaded to Flickr with the app on the camera too. The Light L16 is long out of production and well out of date, but it remains a remarkable camera.

G

 

[abruzzi]

So would I be crazy to buy a new one now in 2025? I don't shoot much digital, I'm 95% film but I'm going on a trip in a month and I'd like to bring a compact digital to carry with my Bronica. Of course its a dead-end, but for the $200 these are selling for on Amazon, I'll take a dead end. Also, my computers are limited to MacOS Mojave/10.14 because of some other software I need that doesn't run on Catalina/10.15, so that limitation isn't really a limitation for me. Thoughts? After whatever firmware updates what are the camera's biggest weaknesses? (for still--I'm not interested in video)

 

[Godfrey]

Hmm. That's a tough judgement call.
I like the L16 a lot, but I was one of the early adopters and have gotten years of use out of mine, thousands of photos made with it.
Would I buy one now? Hmmmm ...

The biggest issue to me is whether one could get the LightOS updates to bring it to the final version (mine is there with LighOS-1.3.4.1-111) as there were things added late in the run that net access to installing the Flickr and SnapSeed apps which make it much more useful. And the other big issue is that the battery is a built-in, technically non-user-interchangeable item. I'm sure an enterprising hacker could manage that, but I don't consider myself one of them...

(Speaking of battery ... This thread has reminded me to pull mine out and plug it in overnight, as it was down to about 20% on the battery from sitting. ...)

I've never used video capture with it. Biggest weakness is that it is not the most responsive camera around and to get the most out of it, you really need its dedicated software; biggest strength is that it is remarkably versatile in a pretty small package and produces very nice results while presenting a minimum to carry.

A tough call. Nowadays, I find myself carrying a Leica M10-R or M10-M and two reasonably compact lenses more of the time.

G

 

[abruzzi]

The OS issue I was originally not worried about because I found this page:

Update Light L16 Camera

Update Light L16 Camera – 101 Guide to Update to Latest Software

l16update.com

Which has the last firmware (1.3.5.1) as well as instructions for flashing the firmware locally. But then I stumbled across a thread elsewhere where a lot of people were having difficulty upgrading to 1.3.5.1. Reading between the line it seems likely that they had non standard setups on their devices. Like somone was selling developer devices that had been rooted and that was causing update issues.

The amazon listing specifically says:

The camera doesn't contain the latest version. Camera Version L16, LightOS Version: 1.3.0.4-067, Camera Firmware: 00431D6A

I think I got the last Lumen from a download link on this thread--2.3.0.606, but the above info and the last Lumen is also available on this github page:

GitHub - helloavo/Light-L16-Archive: Repository for archiving everything Light L16 related before it is all lost form the internet.

Repository for archiving everything Light L16 related before it is all lost form the internet. - helloavo/Light-L16-Archive

github.com

So I'm really not too sure. If I don't get the light I'll probably bring my Olympus E-M10 mk1 which is now a 13 year old camera, and a small manual focus 25mm lens. It seems the L16 would give some more flexibility than that, if I can make it work.

(I'll probably be traveling with a MacBook air so I may be able to offload images to that in the evening and tweak with Lumen and Aperture in the hotel.)

 

[Godfrey]

Interesting, thanks for the links ... I doubt I'll change anything on mine as it works fine and I don't need anything to change, but it's nice to have options.

I still can't say for sure if it's worth buying one now. I like using mine, and it's all charged up again now and ready to go...

G