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

I bought my first Lytro camera three years ago after seeing a classmate using one at a reunion. I loved it, and endured the updates and trials the company had with getting a first Gen camera to work with the updates from Mac! Despite the 'glitches', the first generation camera was a delight to work with so when I say this one at such an unbelievable price, I grabbed it! I downloaded all the training videos and owners manual, and devoured them BEFORE I started taking pictures ... once I was familiar with the ILLUM and its controls, then -and ONLY then-- did I begin shooting. I wanted perfect pictures from the start, but did not get them [my fault]. Once I tried a few more shots, experimented with the settings and taking several pictures of the same thing, THEN I became more adept at the depth- and Light-field phenomena.I have been taking photo's since my first 620-film camera in the mid 60's, various fixed lens and slr's [film] through the 80's , and have been shooting digital since my first point-n-shoot in the early 90's. THIS camera is totally different than anything I've experienced, and I'd strongly suggest learning about the peculiarities of depth of field, f-stops, etc., before investing in this. But once you've learned -- get one!! You won't regret it!

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 .