LYTRO ILLUM 40 Megaray Light Field Camera with Constant F/2.0, 8X Optical Zoom, and 4" Touchscreen LCD (Black)

First things first - if you're jumping on this as a cheap DSLR replacement, you're not going to be happy.If you're up for a new camera to play with and do lots of macro photography, shoot things with a lot of depth, and like experimenting with post-processing, then you'll love this camera.For me, it's a great camera that feels wonderful in the hand and encourages me to look at composition very differently. The body is smooth and looks svelte, the zoom and focus feel surprisingly natural and fluid, and *for the right scenarios*, it pumps out some great pictures. I'm also fairly pleased with the proprietary software used to import and edit pictures, though it's similarly tuned for a specific use case.I've been quite happy with the Lytro Illum, and if you're looking for something new and fun to play with... you might be quite happy, too!

The Camera Itself...Incredible industrial design. Hands down far better then anything else that I've seen on the market.But also quite heavy and large.The Camera Interface...Absolutely awesome. It's clear this was built from the ground up in the age of intuitive smartphones.. Also unlike any other camera I've ever experienced. I love it.The Software...Since you can't do anything with the light field image files generated by the camera without Lytro's custom software, their software is a critical part of the experience of this product.And it's software provides an utterly horrible user experience. In the age where UX is king and there are so many examples of great apps, this feels like something out of the dark ages. I simply have no tolerance for horrible UX.After the files are imported, there's a post processing phase that is super slow. And it's not my computer, as I have a 5k Retina iMac with a 4GHz quad core i7, 32 GBs of RAM and a fusion drive, meaning that the vast majority of the data access is to the SSD.The Photos...I shot north of 100 photos with this and not a single one was worth saving.Virtually every image had tons of noise.It's horrible in low light conditions.It's horrible if there's any movement.Many, many of the images are out of focus..despite being clear on the the camera as they were taken.Straight off the camera the aperture is set to f2.0 and I needed to adjust nearly every single picture taken to make even remotely worth even looking at.Also despite the great marketing videos on the Lytro site showing that cool things you can do by adjusting the aperture I never found a single picture that I took where I'd consider any more then one point in the picture anywhere close to reasonable.The Output Files...I was unable to find any way of exporting a still image from this software at anything greater then at 2450x1634 and file size of 300k (yes, i really did say 300k!) for jpg and 16 MB for tiff. This strikes me as quite odd since the the raw files off the camera are about 107 MBs in size. In the age where a 24MP camera generates 6000x4000 at file sizes of ~6 MBs for jpg (that's 20x the lytro) and ~65 MBs for tiffs, something seams quite wrong here..not sure if its the nature of the technology or the software.My Conclusions...I'm just an amateur photographer and after several hours with this camera I can't see any purpose for it at all... other then a toy to play with for a short time.I really wanted to love this after all the hype about it being a technological breakthrough, but at the end of the day it needs to do something that actually matters..and do it well, but after several hours with it, I found it to be a waste of my time.

I'm not gonna write the pros of this camera. Enough have been said. Here was my experience of this camera which I took out on the 2nd day and shot ~400 photos1) The shutter leg is about 250ms, significantly longer than a normal digital SLR, which is about 100ms. It is easy to miss a good action because of that. It's hard to predict an action 1/4 second before it happens.2) Due to lacking of the optical viewfinder, in order to take the sequential shots, you have to turn off the instant preview. Even with the instant preview is off, it takes about 500ms for the object to reappear on the LCD screen after the previous shot. This makes the quick follow up sequential shots impractical.3) The post processing of the image is too slow on the camera, about 5 seconds, before you can adjust the focus and exam a photo.4) The Lytro PC software is too buggy. It crashed twice while downloading the phots via USB3 cable. It took 3 attempts and over 20 minutes to download ~400 photos about 10GB, which should be well under 1 minute based on the USB3 bandwidth. In the end the photos that I downloaded were just a bunch of corrupted images that could not be processed. I had to download one photo a time.5) The refocused JPEG image generated from the Lytro software was only 50KB, which is very low resolution. Maybe I was doing something wrong.This camera is still worthwhile for shooting still images, i.e. portrait or landscape. The price is getting attractive. You could easily spend over $1000 on an f2 SLR zoom lens. Until the above issues are resolved, this camera will remain as an interesting toy, not ready for the serious photography .

A number of reviewers have written about this camera's shortcomings; low (4 MP) equivalent resolution, quirky desktop software, and the limited use case for this camera. All of these are, in fact, issues. At its original price of $1,600, I couldn't justify buying it. But at $329, it seemed worth trying and I'm glad I bought it. I have only had it a few days and am still figuring out the best way to use its multi-focus technology, but I am very impressed with the underlying technology. If for no other reason, taking pictures with it and experimenting with different focus points (after the fact) is a great way to learn about depth of field and focusing my regular camera (Nikon D810). Are the photos as good as what the D810 produces, not at all. But I have, nonetheless, made some pretty good photos with it. Also, it is also very good at shots of detailed objects that I might otherwise need a macro lens for. Will I ever rely on it for shots I must have? No. But as a second camera in the bag, it's a great alternative and a lot of fun to play with.