That was just over a decade ago, and I'm still teaching photography. It's not that the technology didn't quite catch on as the company's founder Ren Ng had hoped. It's more that the technology really missed any sort of market it was aiming for. As Ken from the Computer Clan on YouTube tells it, the camera was a case of too little, too late in many senses.
First, the too little part: one of the things that caused me (and almost the entire photo community) to dismiss such a fascinating camera was the resolution. At 1,080x1,080 maximum output, all of my photos would be about the size of a postage stamp. While any photographer would love for the ability to refocus a photo after the fact, focus doesn't really matter all that much if a photo is only just over a megapixel in resolution anyway. What's the point?
Certainly, the camera was an interesting experiment. It was shaped like a rectangular slab and was operated solely by a small touchscreen on the back. No one can fault the company for experimenting with the form of traditional cameras if that new form worked, but in the case of the Lytro light field camera, it was plagued by a sub-par screen and confusing controls.
As the Computer Clan retrospective video tells it, the camera was also released in 2012, when the smartphone photo genie was already out of the bottle. Ease of use trumped quality or fancy features. It's a similar concept to how music audio quality has gone downhill as the world has moved from CDs to MP3s to streaming audio. It's a lot easier to listen to music on Spotify using Apple CarPlay than it is to dig up a CD. If Lytro had shown up to the party 5 or 6 years earlier, the company might not have met an unfortunate end in 2018.
Lytro did try to cours- correct and introduced a second camera in 2015, the Illum, but at four megapixels, while it addressed the form-factor issues of the first camera, it still didn't really do anything on the resolution front to sway actual photographers from their DSLRs.
There's a few more interesting bits to the Lytro company story that you can see in the video above.
Have you ever used a Lytro light field camera? Do you have an Illum sitting in your closet? What were your feelings about the technology? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.
I remember fondly the announcement of the camera, and the blatantly unavailable information around resolution. They quoted absurdly large numbers of "megarays" and probably should have also cited "A gazillion gourmet warbly snickets" because it was equally confusing. By the time you were able to finally find the 1-megapixel information you'd tired of wanting one. Even their second attempt was a wierd form factor.
I'd always assumed some film company would incorporate their tech into a "shoot now, focus later" video camera, since the resolution wasn't as critical as stills. I guess none of that happened and they simply went the way of the dodo. Shame really, with some development it really would have been both revolutionary, and useful. If only they'd skipped the nonsense around megarays...
I have a Lytro Illum. It's an interesting device I bought at a deep discount once they realized people weren't going to be dropping their DSLRs for them. The thing is, I do think it's a worthwhile device in the sense that some strange art lenses are worthwhile - one person's gimmick is another's creative spark, even if in this case it didn't always do what it advertised entirely convincingly.
The real problem is that after Lytro closed their website for uploading "live images", there's no other place to load them, either. You can move focus and such and save that as a video file, but the point was to allow the viewer a little discretion with how to view the image. I believe 500px allowed them for a while, but whatever support they offered for anything other than JPEGs is long gone. I'd still use it occasionally if there was a place to freely upload live images.
Aesthetically, it was a very striking looking device, too, particularly for a fixed-lens camera.
We reviewed the Lytro Illum and concluded it was a scam. it didn't actually realize any of its promises... The primitive depth-mapping seemed to be software-based (processed on your computer, off-camera) rather than hardware-based and it absolutely sucked, consistently putting out terrible images with fake blur in the wrong parts of the picture. I think the hardware never worked properly and they tried to hide the failure to meet marketing promises by doing subject-detection on a computer. But they never worked that out properly, either.
The optical quality of the lens was atrocious and the camera crashed CONSTANTLY. Always freezing and rebooting. I can't think of a worse camera I've ever reviewed.
Your 2023 comment: "We reviewed the Lytro Illum and concluded it was a scam"
Your 2015 review video: "we think it's a fun tool... not that fun of a camera to actually use but we're very excited about Lytro as a company and we're
looking forward to future versions of the software and the camera"
As someone who spent a year working for Lytro and training camera store salespeople on the technology, I can say Wasim is mostly correct. The truth goes much deeper. The tech was never quite ready for prime time, and management refused to listen to those of us they heavily recruited from the photo industry for our photo expertise. I myself, and several others, were plucked from Canon just prior to the Illum's launch. Those of us who knew never tried to position it as a replacement for your DSLR or mirrorless camera. We felt it was a potentially great multimedia creation tool- if they could get the kinks worked out.
One of the big reasons they failed to make ANY kind of inroads to the photo industry was their refusal to actually market to photographers. They continually sent the thing to tech blogs to review, who naturally loved the idea, but weren't the right audience, and to people like Tony, but without any real explanation of the technology, which ended up in misguided opinions. Don't get me wrong, the camera was not ready for photographers, it was rushed, and needed work, but it could have been groundbreaking.
The final issue was that they refused to understand how photographers worked. My boss, VP of sales Jeff Hansen, would repeatedly tell me that the photo industry needed a shakeup, yet he refused to listen when I tried to tell him why no one was responding. He didn't care what the needs of photographers were and thought we should be welcomed with open arms simply because we had something new and exciting. CEO Jason Rosenthal wasn't much better. In the end, Jeff felt the best way to manage was to bully his staff, force us into situations that weren't useful for advancing the brand in the photo world, and lying to employees.
Development was underway for the next generation, and it was planned to be a large step forward. In the end, investors got impatient. Photographers were open to it, if it suited their needs. The Illum simply didn't get there, and the impatience of the investors forced Lytro to pivot to another failed venture- virtual reality. Thankfully, I was gone by then. Then Google bought them for pennies on the dollar and shelved everything. Oh well.
I joined the pre-orders, used it for the trial period and got a refund. It was interesting with the right subjects. The resolution was okay for social media. But it was too limited as a camera and had that awkward square tube design with tiny screen. Plus there was the weak computer app. It now has a prominent place in the museum of failed innovations.
Any camera that doesn't manage to beat technology that's already around will automatically fail, no matter how many "megarays" you advertise. Not only did Lytro have an abysmal resolution of 1.2 megapixels (when phones already had 12). The bokeh didn't look any better than what phones already did with depth maps. The workflow from taking a picture and being able to post something on Instagram was tedious (AFAIR they didn't even have the option to save a picture as a normal JPG in the beginning). Add the hefty price tag on the level of a DSLR and you have the perfect mixture for a flop of biblical proportions.