If you don't enjoy the semi-concerned glances of total strangers, clearly worried that the thing you just yanked from your bag is not a camera but a futuristic Men in Black sort of weapon, do not use the Light L16. At least not yet. With 16 lenses peeking out from the camera's front like an unblinking insect, the L16 looks ready to lunge forward and deliver a needling death blow at any moment.
After using the L16 for several weeks, I can state confidently that it will not come to life and kill anyone. I can also say confidently that this is unlike any camera I've ever tested before. The L16 is full of contradictions: It's about the size of a super-thick Amazon Kindle, yet captures more image data than almost any high-end DSLR. All of its lenses are fixed, but you get a huge range of zoom options. You shoot with it like a smartphones, but need a powerful PC to edit your photos. It's capable of delivering astounding images, like I never thought possible, but it can also suck pretty spectacularly.
Light (the company behind the L16) is developing an extremely powerful, feature-rich take on photography, one that bets more on computer science than hyper-precision optics. At $1,950, the L16 itself is mostly a curiosesity, a plaything for people with closets full of DSLRs and a permanent hankering for the next new thing. Light built it as a concept car, proof that its tech really does work. The L16 offers an early, decidedly imperfect look at how algorithms will dictate the future of photography. Something like the tech in the L16 will power your next smartphones, or maybe the one after that.
There's an immense amount of complicated software and engineering behind the L16, which we've explained thoroughly before. Here's the absolute basics: whenever you take a photo with the L16, 10 of its 16 individual sensors fire. They capture different perspectives and focal lengths (from 28 to 150mm), which the L16's software processes into a single, super-high-resolution image. Since the camera captures all this data, you can do things like adjust your focus after you've taken the shot, or crop a photo without losing any discernible fidelity. All from a camera about the size of a paperback book.
The "how it works" may be complicated, but actually using the L16 feels pretty familiar. The device runs androids, and doesn't try to disguise it. When you turn the camera on by pressing the power button, it boots up and automatically opens a camera app. In that app, you swipe up and down to control zoom levels, then either tap on the screen or half-press the shutter button to focus, and then fully press the shutter to fire.
I almost wish the L16 was more complicated. Years of shooting with high-end cameras has made me comfortable twisting and prodding their many buttons and knobs, and I missed some of that manual control with the L16. (There is a small touch panel on the right side, above the grip, that will someday be enabled as a zoom control, but nothing yet.) Light's thinking is that most people are comfortable with the way their phones cameras work, and that there's no reason to introduce more complexity. Whatever, I still want a couple of buttons.