K-Lens One Kickstarter campaign has been cancelled due to financial issues, backers will be refunded: Digital Photography Review
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The Kickstarter campaign for the K-Lens One light-field lens has been cancelled at the last minute due to ‘financial issues’. The campaign had raised almost €200,000 on a €75,000 goal and had orders for 95 units, but despite this it seems other behind-the-scenes funding fell through. In a statement the company says it was left uncertain about whether the lenses could be made, and rather than backers losing their money bosses decided to pull the plug on the campaign before it ended. The company says that supporters won’t be charged.
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K-Lens One is a lens that uses a mirror tunnel within the optical construction to produce a grid of nine images on the sensor, all taken from a slightly different angle. These images are then used to produce a depth-map of a scene that can generate 3D images, be used for depth-based editing and to adjust the focus plane after the shot is recorded.
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| A picture taken with the K-Lens One on the Nikon Z7, and a depth-map created in the company’s software using information gathered from the nine images the mirror tunnel in the lens produces. |
In comments posted in the Updates section of the campaign page a spokesperson said that the decision was left until the last minute as it was hoped a ‘pressing financing issue’ could have been resolved by the end of the campaign, but it could not. ‘So we are not 100% sure we can produce and deliver the K|Lens One. We didn’t want you Kickstarter backers to take a risk here. That’s why we made this decision.’
The issue was not connected to the funds raised on the Kickstarter campaign, the spokesperson says, but another problem in the company’s financial structure. The company wants to carry on with the project it seems and fully intends to develop the lens, but it seems at the moment quite how that will happen is uncertain.‘Better safe than sorry’ says one commenter. ‘Yes, we think so too!’ comes the reply.
K-Lens has other parts of the business that concentrate on industrial applications for the concept and that seems to be continuing as normal. Perhaps we’ll see the consumer lens appear again in the future.
Statement on Kickstarter:
Project cancelation
Last Friday was supposed to be the final day of the K|Lens One Kickstarter campaign. We would like to thank all the supporters for believing in our product and team and making the campaign so successful.
Nonetheless its success, we have carefully reviewed our financial assumptions on product pricing and production costs and have come to the conclusion that, currently, also given the financing of our start-up, we are not able to guarantee the production and delivery of the K|Lens One.
We have therefore decided to cancel the campaign a few hours before it would have reached its end.
After 5 years of extremely hard work. We are very disappointed for breaking up this way, and we are sorry for not fulfilling the expectations of the kickstarter community. On the other side, if we promise a product, we want to deliver what we promise and this is something we just cannot guarantee today.
We are now focusing on fund raising and will be working hard to relaunch in the near future !
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