The Verge says Lytro Illum “is the camera of the future”, then tells us how much it sucks →
I love The Verge.
Look at the photos in that review: every photo of the Illum, taken by a normal camera, is better than any photo taken by the Illum itself.
I can’t find one technically good photo in their entire Illum-taken gallery. All I see is the same major optical problems as the first Lytro camera two years ago: drab color, obvious chromatic aberration, and a severe lack of sharpness. The refocusing ability isn’t very useful if no part of the photo is actually sharp at any setting.
Compared to The Verge’s previous Lytro review (“You’ve never seen a camera like this before”), it sounds like they haven’t made much progress at all. It’s still an expensive, mediocre, limited, unreliable camera that does nothing better than our existing smartphone cameras except one rarely useful, poorly executed gimmick, which requires bad proprietary processing software and clunky web embeds.
Nothing about this is “the future” of photography.