Light L16 - 4K Multi-Lense 52MP Pocket-Sized DSLR-Quality Camera with Built-in Wifi, Touchscreen, Software Updated Built-in 256GB Storage (New)

I am a retired, professional photographer who used to shoot with two Canon 5D Mark IV DSLRs. Ever since my son was born, I had hung up the cameras in order to focus on raising him -- then two children followed for a total of three. I have rarely reached out to the Canon 5D's now to take photos because they are so bulky and inconvenient to carry around. Smartphones have come a long way and produce excellent images, especially when enhanced by the phone's artificial intelligence/processing algorithm. And so I find myself taking photos and videos mostly from the phones purely out of convenience for the moment unfolding right in front of my eyes.As well as smartphones -- like my Samsung Galaxy S21+ -- take photos, they are only really good when viewed on the camera or screen and when printed in small sizes for those of you who still do prints (we occasionally do.) One thing that most smartphones have in common is their lack of optical zooms. Nokia came out with some great phones when they were under Microsoft's ownership long ago. Alas, it did not sell well.This Light-branded camera caught my eye (no pun intended) with its multiples of lenses. There are 16 of them -- SIXTEEN! What would you do with so many lenses, you may ask? From zooming in or out, creating beautifully rich, blurred backgrounds or what not, each one serves a different purpose for the scene or artistic vision before you. The photographer gets to choose the focal length, aperture, and shutter speed, of course, mirroring very much a digital SLR's capabilities. The lenses are equivalent to 35mm, 70mm, and 150mm. The human eye sees at about 50mm.Camera is compact and fits in the back of my pants pocket, charges via USB-C (cable and USB 3.0 AC adapter included), and the 5x optical zoom helps ensure the zoomed images look much sharper than if done through my Samsung phone (whose optical zoom maxes out at 2x.)How do the images compare to my Canon 5D Mark IV. Well, comparing a $400 camera is not really fair to a $2,700 DSLR (which does not include the cost of the various, equivalent lenses that this Light one comes with). With that said, the photos came out pretty decent in well-lit environments with slightly cold color reproduction, good sharpness and background blur (bokeh), and dynamic range (capturing dark and light scenes pretty well with little banding). HDR images came out surprisingly good.In dark environments, the Canon is no match -- Light's images produced some banding and introduced quite a bit of noise as you cranked up the ISO level. You can see some artificial image processing in the final photos where it had attempted to denoise. Still, they came out better than my Samsung Galaxy S21+ phone's.Images can be viewed from the built-in 5" touchscreen, but like other, non-SLR cameras, there is no optical viewfinder to take photos through. You rely on the touchscreen to frame and photograph your subjects.The built-in flash is tiny and laughable, as expected, for a camera of this size. There is no connection option for an external flash. Neither do smartphones.I did not test the 4K video capability. WiFi, GPS, and Bluetooth are built in for geotagging images and downloading them to the smartphone or computer. Memory is built-in with a generous 256GB. It cannot be expanded nor is it removable. What this means is that if the camera dies, the repair person or someone digging through your trash could potentially get a hold of your photos. So, be sure to destroy the camera if you want to get rid of your photos when it no longer works.

The files that the camera creates for the high-resolution (52mp) pictures are .lri files. The software that the camera is designed to be used with, Lumen, is not available anywhere. Without that software, the best photos you will get are crappy jpg thumbnails.Also, the last firmware did not come installed in this camera. While it is supposedly available, it has to be side-loaded in developer mode. If you're a linux fan, then that may not sound like a big deal, but for normal people, it is.If the software were available, I would make the effort to try to make it work. Without Lumen, this is a waste of money.

Ok, so this camera, the Light L16 was discontinued in 2019, and here we are in 2022 and whoever had a remaining supply of them new has decided to clear them out. Original price $2000, current price… I paid $169, and since my purchase it has dropped to $159, and possibly lower (now in early 2023 they are up to $250). Originally described as a DSLR in your pocket, the L16 has 16 cameras and lenses… Yes, 16. It takes photos with between 5 and 10 cameras at a time, and the closer to 35mm and 75mm you set the zoom, the better the image quality. The largest resolution photos are taken at 28mm (80MP), and the lowest resolution shots are at 69mm and 150mm (13MP). So, if you want the absolute best image quality you will shoot at 35MM and 75MM and you will have about 52MP resolution and the shot will be taken with 10 camera. This is a good camera for someone who has patience, and who isn’t in a hurry to take a shot. It isn’t well suited for sports photography, or for shooting anything that is moving fast, like a baby or a toddler. It is a great conversation starter. When you pull it out of its case, everyone will be asking what it is. As I said, patience is important, and that is even more tru for processing the images into a usable result. To get anything better than 13MP, you absolutely HAVE to process the photos with the Luma software., which can be quite slow. Fortunately it puts out DNG files, so you can use Adobe Lightroom to finish put the editing. About the software, it runs on Windows10, so since most of yo have that, then you are good. For you Mac owners, like me however, things get a bit more sticky. Lumen does run on a Mac, but it only runs on macOS Catalina (10.15.7), not the lastest macOS Ventura, so you will either have to keep a Windows machine around to post process the L16 images, or you will ahve to keep an older Mac around, or run older macOS software in a virtual machine to get it to run on Ventura. Not a simple task, and I am still working out the details of my workflow. Oh, and before I forget, I need to mention that you need lots of storage for your images too, several hundred MB for each photo, so be sure to buy that external 4TB drive so you don’t run out too quickly.Overview: Ok, so by now you know that camera isn’t for everybody. If you are up for a challenge, and I do mean a challenge, then the low price of the camera at this point might be enough to make you opt-in. If you do, don’t say I didn’t warn you, and if you find the challenge is too great, then let me know I will take it off your hands if you will let it go pretty cheap. Good luck!!Update 1: As I mentioned above, Macintosh computer users may have some problems trying to get the Light Lumen software to work on their computers. If you have a Mac with the new M1/M2 cpu like I do then my experience is that we are out of luck. The Lumen software does not run on Ventura. I was hopeful that I could run an older version of the macOS, virtualized on my current Mac, but that turns out not to work “YET”! I tried UTM, VirtualBox, VMWare Fusion, VirtualBuddy, and Parallels, and I was not able to get any of the x86 version s of the macOS to run on any of them on my M1 Mac. There are Arm versions of macOS that will run, but those versions of macOS don’t run the Lumen software. So, it seems like we are stuck running Lumen on an old Macintosh with an Intel processor or on a Windows10/11 machine. I have not yet tried virtualizing Windows10/11 x86 on my M1 Mac, but it seems unlikely that will work either. My final takeaway for this update is that there just doesn’t seem like there is any way to run Lumen on a modern Mac, even in a virtual machine. This is sad because it means the workflow to use a Light L16 camera is very cumbersome and involves moving hundreds of MB of photo data between at least two computer. Sad indeed!Update 1.1: I ended up buying a small BeeLink SEi8 Windows11 machine (from Amazon) for use with my initial Light L16 for importing and initial image processing. Then after I have the images in the computer I use a program called FreeFileSync to copy the images over to a shared folder on my Mac mini. This works well and allows me to do any final image editing on Adobe Lightroom.Update 2: *** Hope Where Little Hope Exists ***When Light.co went out of business, the company was bought by John Deere corporation. Deer got all the software and firmware from Light.co to use in their international like of optically controlled automated farm equipment. They wanted Light.co’s technology, and that was a smart move that has probably advanced Deere immeasurably in the design and manufacturing of their big automated harvesters. I know, an interesting story. Well, the reason I tell you this is because I have been unable to contact anyone in the Deere software development group in the hope of convincing them to license or release the L16 firmware source code so that it can be further developed for the community. As a software engineer, soon retiring, I would love ot have a personal software development project on the L16 to bring it up to date on the latest Android 11, and to enhance the current PC/Mac software to run on the latest computers. I don’t want to make any money doing this, as I am already setup for retirement, and it would need to be a community project so others could participate in the development. It would not harm the John Deere corporation in any way, and would provide a show of support to the community that would enhance their already stellar reputation. So, I am asking/pleading with John Deere corporation to contact me to start this process of bringing new life to a product that died way too early. Thank you for listening. Tom Zimmer PhotoBubba “on the web” (dot) com

What a fascinating and interesting device. I appreciate the challenges in terms of the software and updates etc (there are not any) but once you have downloaded the last available update which is freely available from a number of sites and also up downloaded the pc windows lumen software again available from a number of sites for the price, this device is unbelievable. From a phone comparison perspective I have been using Sony Xperia Pro I and the Sony Xperia 1 VI for the last 4 years so my comparison is based on those which are recognized for high quality photos from their main sensors. The Light L16 is better for portrait, landscape and city scape photos. There is more depth and the images sharper. Yes you have to master the software and editing to get the most out of it which I am happy to do. An amazing concept that actually works.