The next digital image revolution?

It's hard to overstate the impact of digital photography. Over the last two decades, virtually every aspect of how we take, keep and share photos has been transformed. But despite the explosive innovation around digital picture-taking, the end result has actually changed very little. A photo is still a photo. And a poorly focused photo is still as bad as ever.

Ren Ng aims to fix that.

Ng is the founder of Lytro, a Mountain View, CA start-up that has been lauded by tech-obsessed first-adopters and photo enthusiasts alike. The product that has everyone so excited? A compact "plenoptic" digital camera. The camera, a short square-edged tube, uses a unique sensor resembling an insect's multi-faceted eye to capture "all the light traveling in every direction in every point in space." Pair the camera with Lytro's proprietary software, and the result is an image that can be focused and refocused after it's taken. Use Lytro's special Flash widget to post that photo on your blog or site and everyone who sees it can focus and refocus on any point in the image. In the words of Wired's John Bradley -- it's "addictive."