Lytro Light Field Camera

Well made but NOT a camera for the typical or casual photo shooter or faint at heart. Any / all photos taken with this camera have to downloaded with special Lytro software (a very slow process) and processed BEFORE it can even be exported to a useable/printable file. I am glad I got the 8g and not the 16g version. All the hoopla about living pictures and being able to refocus after taking a photo is a serious weakness, not an advantage typical camera usage in my opinion.Basic camera, Looks great, well made but poor ergonomics;I found myself often accidently changing the zoom setting, it gets changed just by rubbing it in the wrong place and have to reset it often. The memory for pictures and the battery are both built in and NOT changeable/swappable. Controls are simple but semi-hidden within the rubbery wrap around the camera.The zoom lens seems to be quite good, and reasonably fast at f2.The cute magnetic lens cover fell off easily and would be easily lost, neat & nerdy but not practical except for storage. Colors were good and well saturated in good lighting but poor UV filtering caused subjects in shade to be off color. On my 2 Lytro cameras I hot-glued 28 to 37mm step rings (perfect fit) around the lens to accommodate a std UV filer (or any other filters etc I might want to use.) it also serves as a lens protector that can simply stay on the camera 24/7.WHY TWO Lytro cameras?I am an experimentographer, I experiment. I bought 2 so I could have a matched stereo pair. I plan to try using the Lytro pair for lenticular stereo 3D prints (w/ 4 perspectives), The single Lytro zero mm lens base 3D is not great, but not bad either. It works better for some subjects than others. The resulting Lytro pictures are only 1MP or 1080 x 1080, a limiting factor of this camera with a 11MP imager. The very expensive 40MP Lytro would be far more suited for general photography.

I purchased my Lytro light field camera when they first came out. Because it doesn't focus at the time of taking the picture I hoped with would be good for taking candid shots without any focus delay. Well it fails on two counts. One, it isn't actually very quick at taking pictures and two the picture quality is extremely poor. It is even worse in anything except bright sunshine light levels. The software (required to process pictures for viewing/printing etc.) is also horrible. Slow and clumsy. Interesting concept but stick with your phone camera!

At first, when these cameras came out, I thought it was a brilliant idea and it would be fun to have one for alternative shots. I bought the camera late in the game and just a couple of months after I purchased it, Lytro decided to get rid of their website (where you can download your photos) and now there is ZERO support for this product! What's the use of having this when I can't download the photos or use them? DO NOT BUY THIS ITEM. You will have no support.