I believe at some point the same tech was being trailed with 'standard' DSLR's by simply placing a multi lens filter in front of the imaging chip. Thus one could use 'any' lens and create the Lytro effect. I believe its the same people as Lytro that were experimenting on this. Only thing is you need LOTS of spare resolution... I believe they used a Phase One or similar.

OK, please excuse me if I sound dumb. I am sure the technology is legit, and will shape the future, but with this specific product, other than the ability of shifting the angle which I will admit is cool, would't you be able to create a product that does similar things (to the eye) simply by having a very long depth of field and then using software to change what is in focus and what isn't? I am not saying it would be the same, and perhaps the biggest difference is that this lens having a larger F-stop would be brighter which is obviously worth something, but am I completely wrong in believing much of the effect could be achieved with a standard telephoto lens and software?

They have said that they will in the future release an SDK, hopefully they do that sooner than later, so people can really start digging into the files and I think we'll see some very interesting things.

Imagine a video raw file with this technology, where you can pull focus after the fact? Sounds great! 3D conversions might also be possible from a single lens.

Yes VK, however doesn't the resultant image (array->rendered image) look more like 300x300? It was very small in many examples... Unless something has changed?

Light field cameras are not going to become mainstream until sensors are 10x resolution then they are now... (or a completely different approach to sensor design).

And then other things come into play...

I would think resolution is a large issue for Lytro, as the tech is not really there yet...

@Vitaliy_Kiselev you see, sometimes you're too much skeptical :) the first time we spoke about this technology here (http://www.personal-view.com/talks/discussion/269), you weren't very much confident that it will arrive any time soon. Now it's here, not perfect of course (and useless for most of us), but promising

http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/lytro/

http://www.theverge.com/2012/2/29/2821763/lytro-review

The lytro sellings has started..

Let's properly rephrase it.
They started shipping few first cameras to people who ordered very long time ago and expected shipping about two months ago.

There are plenty of papers on the internet which describe the concept and fwiw, the "original" was implemented using a modded Canon DLSR. The basic idea is you capture a light field which is in essence an array of images constructed using a coded pinhole/aperture array and from that you can reconstruct a final image using some algorithm. Stanford University have an uber camera array which basically accomplishes the same thing. Its pretty interesting stuff. It also allows you to "see through" objects ;) Search for computational photography and you'll get a load of results.

I thought they got aliens technology!!!

Lytro inside (from FCC report)