Holy crap, that's cool. I want to know how it works. Someone give me $500 so I can buy one and take it apart.

Great, just in time to be useful for running down the Nexus 6 models as they start making their way back from the off-world colonies in a few years.

Now Blade Runner's photo-panning scene seems (notionally) reasonable.

Considering that low-end digital SLR cameras start at $500 or so, I'd hardly consider this a "Rich Person's Toy."

@3:

JINX!

Look a little closer, and you'll see that it ends up making images that are 1.2 megapixels from a sensor that would be able to do 10x that if 'conventionally' used. That perspective shift? Watch as your image shrinks dramatically as you move left and right. The only way you will be able to navigate around is if you fill space with omnidirectional cameras (and somehow keep them from seeing each other). Practical!

This lightfield stuff is neat (those fancy 'circling' shots in The Matrix were accomplished by something similar), but I predict it will be remain a niche. Auto-focus and piles of digital storage means that you can just bracket exposures with a current conventional camera and a lot more for your efforts.

A friend of mine has pointed out that this type of implementation might be great in situations where you are rushed and just want to quickly capture the moment, damn the low res - cellphone cameras! We'll see; Lytro deserves credit for at least trying this out.

And lay of Daguerre! Those images can convey everything we can today with regular photographs, except color. Tell me this image of Phineas Gage is 'quaint': http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/booster_…

I'm gonna get one. Once it's 400$ cheaper.

It's not the future, but it's neat. $400 is a bit steep still for something that's fated for the bin where you keep your Holga, your old stereo camera gear, and possibly a pair of red leather pants.

If they could stick this technology into an iPhone where it belongs, they'd be on to something.

@6 That photo of Gage is definitely quaint.

@4, I rather think the takeaway from that is photography is a rich person's game.

And that's not to say the possibilities of this technology don't amount to anything (there's maybe some cool potential there), my comment was just directed at this particular product.

Thought I'd clear that up, you know, for the absolutely no one that's keeping score.

@ 4, you can get SLR's cheaper than that, and decent ones, too, but your point is taken. Any decent digital camera had cost close to $1,000 twelve years ago.

Hit post too soon. I meant to add that any serious hobby photographer would pay that. They already spend a lot on equipment.

As a pro photographer I can tell you that the awesomeness of this technology is pretty exaggerated. This is a great tool to play with focus but there is something to be said to be forced think through composition and a desired focus of a subject before you take a picture. The ability to play with depth of field does nothing for being able to compose a photograph in the first place. Much like when HD video started becoming standard on pro SLRs, there was this promise in the air that all you had to do was shoot some video and then pick the best photo. However it soon became clear that there was a difference between recording a scene and photographing it.

Meh.. I don't get the fascination with these. I agree that if/when you can navigate around in a photo more completely, that would be cooler, but I don't think the Lytro comes close. It just seems like a gimmick. Focus close, focus far, focus close, focus far. Whee. And it ignores that there is massive infrastructure in place for 2D photos, both online and in the physical world, and this won't work in any of it. You need Flash just to look at the photos.

Since these things were teased months ago and then released to great excitement from geeks everywhere, my reaction has been and remains: meh.

Read/download Lytro honcho Ren Ng's Stanford Ph.D. thesis here. Fascinating stuff even if, like me, you can only grasp a fraction of it.

When did $400 - $500 equipment become a rich person's toy?

Seems reasonable to me...

I was exaggerating a bit, and when you make your livelihood from photography, $400-$500 is a completely reasonable amount of money to spend on your equipment (I live with an illustrator, I'm well aware that getting the right materials and equipment is a good investment). I do think the cost of entry to photography is high compared to, say drawing or painting (though it can get pretty expensive to do those things, too). Of course decent cameras are getting more and more affordable, so my exaggerated statement holds less and less truth. No doubt the stereotype of rich kids taking b&w photos of lawnchairs calling themselves artists will persist, despite the growing accessibility of the medium.

It's not a rich person's toy because it's a $400-$500 camera. It's a rich person's toy because it's a $400-$500 camera that takes shit quality photos.

The technology may be game-changing eventually, but the Lytro is nothing but a tech demo. It's pretty much the equivalent of an Apple QuickTake from 1994.

You kids and your wacky gadgets with cutting edge technology. I'm still getting enjoyment out of my Kodak Disc camera.

Gonna be a while before the technology is taken serious by photographers. My phone takes higher quality pictures. Cool and holds an interesting future, but pretty useless right now. I hope they really put some effort into it.

BTW, about 28 years ago I had a college professor working on 3D television, that would be visible without glasses. That has never panned out, evidently. Sometimes these wonderful things don't.

@15, good god, Flash? If Lytro wants to survive they need to get the hell away from that delivery system. Adobe is basically abandoning Flash.

Porn is about to get interesting.

I'm sort of surprised to see techno-hype from Paul!

Lytro is the first real commercial application for hardware-based computational photography, photography that uses multiple exposures (either simultaneous, as with a Lytro, or over very short periods of time, as with HDR or high-dynamic range pictures) to create something new. (Multiple exposures in a camera aren't the same thing, as they combine light additively, not selectively.)

Computational photography will change how pictures are taken, especially snapshot, but the Lytro has a lot of the gizmo about it, rather than, say, the iPhone in 2007.