If you ever toyed with the idea of wanting a Lytro Illum camera, now is probably the time to put this idea into action. With a list price of $1,299, this certainly revolutionary camera now costs $379 on Amazon. It is not only a camera that redefines photography. Lytro turns our conception of photography on its head with the introduction of the light field technology, a technology that makes us forget everything we ever knew about photography.
Forget the rule of thirds; shoot for depth. And stop half-pressing the damn shutter and expecting something to happen. Focusing doesn’t matter anymore. And now you can get the pretty serious Illum package for the price of a point-and-shoot.
The Illum is Lytro’s second and first real camera, and I don’t really care if they have to sell overstock. Well they exit the consumer photography business and turn their focus to virtual reality — like Nokia and others. The company’s CEO Jason Rosenthal explained:
The cold hard fact was that we were competing in an established industry where the product requirements had been firmly cemented in the minds of consumers by much larger more established companies.
Now they’re betting on the Immerge, a 360° camera designed for cinematic virtual reality, a field without many established players yet. Doesn’t make the Lytro Illum a less fascinating camera. Traditional cameras capture the position of light rays to produce an image, but Lytro’s unique technology records the direction of light rays, allowing you to capture 3D images from a single shot and refocus a photo after you take it. Lytro’s patented micro lens array technology captures a deeper picture by unlocking the ability to capture the color, intensity and direction of the light rays flowing into the camera.
The Illum Lytro’s design is a marriage of present and future, with emphasis on the future, yet there’s no mistaking the Illum for anything but a DSLR-like camera, featuring a unibody magnesium chassis, aluminum lens barrel, zoom and focus rings, adjustable ISO and exposure dials, hot shoe for any standard flash, an SD card slot, USB 3.0 port for transferring data and built-in Wi-Fi for wirelessly transmitting living images to any of your devices. Add the touchscreen, which uses a simplified, intuitive interface that operates more like a smartphone camera app than more complex DSLR counterparts.
The heart of the Illum is a 40 megaray (a measure of light field data capture) light sensor which can capture 40 million rays of light, allowing to refocus on an extremely granular scale. The mechanical shutter can snap up to 1/4000th of a second, making it ideal for capturing action shots.
The camera comes with 8x optical zoom, 30-250mm equivalent focal length, constant F2.0 aperture and built-in 1:3 macro, so you can capture a variety of images without having to change lenses or adjust lighting conditions.
You’ll need to use Lytro’s own software to process your photos, but you can also transfer them to Lightroom, Photoshop, or Aperture to work on them after you’ve adjusted the focus and depth of field. And now you can enjoy 71& off, that’s nearly $1,000, one of the most technologically advanced cameras in the market.
The Lytro Illum is available on Amazon and B&H Photo for $379.