You have to give Lytro some credit for going back to the drawing board and starting fresh with its second-generation camera, the Illum ($1,599). Its first attempt, the eponymous Lytro ($149.99 at Amazon) , didn't look, feel, or handle like a camera, and it suffered for it. Like the first attempt, the Illum is a light-field model. Its unique sensor design allows you to adjust the focus of an image after it's been captured. And, unlike the odd first-generation product, the Illum is more camera-shaped; it looks like a larger mirrorless body with a big lens attached, and it's got both physical controls and a touch-screen display. Image quality is a little better, but setting aside the tricks that the light-field image sensor is capable of producing, it still lags well behind smaller, less expensive cameras. If you're really in love with the idea of light field photography, the Illum is certainly a better camera than its predecessor, but I'm of the opinion that the technology isn't yet ready for prime time.

Design and Features

The Illum ($449.99 at Amazon)  is on the large side. It measures 3.4 by 5.7 by 6.5 inches (HWD) and is rather hefty at 2.1 pounds. Its fixed lens is huge, accounting for the bulk of the depth; it supports 72mm filters, and a big lens hood is included that adds another few inches to the depth when installed. The lens has two control rings—one to adjust the zoom and one to focus manually. The latter may seem out of place on a camera that promises to focus after the shot, but there are limitations to that functionality. There's no question that the Illum looks great—a lot of effort has been put into the industrial design and styling—but its size is going to be a turnoff for chic technologists who value gadgets that exude style.

The Illum's ability to adjust focus (and perspective) after an image has been captured is due to its image sensor design. Traditional camera sensors record the luminosity and color of incoming light, but the Illum uses what's called a light-field sensor that also records direction of incoming light. So yes, you can refocus portions of an image after a shot is captured, but depending on how far the lens is zoomed in and how close you are to your subject, the amount of refocusing varies. The Illum has a depth-of-field scale that shows the range of what can be refocused in an image, and if you tap the Lytro button behind the shutter release, you'll get a visual representation of what parts of the images can be brought into focus prior to capturing a shot. But you don't want to leave that view enabled all the time, as it makes the feed on the rear LCD noticeably choppy.

The lens can focus right up to its front element and out to infinity—I shot some images during a heavy snowstorm and I was able to focus on snow that had landed on the lens. As far as light gathering goes, it is equivalent to an f/2 lens on a traditional camera, with a full-frame zoom range of 30-250mm. That's a bit tighter than the 24mm wide-angle lenses you'll find on most compact cameras; the closest traditional model in terms of zoom range and light-gathering to the Illum is the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-RX10 ($698.00 at Amazon) , which covers a 24-200mm range at a fixed f/2.8 aperture. The RX10 has a built-in flash, which the Illum lacks. The company sells an add-on flash, the Viltron JY680L ($249.99), but it's bulky and expensive.

In addition to the Lytro button and shutter release, there are a few other physical controls. There's a rear control dial and buttons to engage AF, lock exposure (AEL), set the focus distance to infinity, and to enter image playback mode (Fn). You'll use the touch screen to change other settings, such as the drive mode, self-timer, shooting mode, and white balance, and to navigate through and adjust menu settings.

The rear LCD is mounted on a hinge, which is useful for capturing images from low and high angles alike. But it doesn't face all the way forward for light-field selfies. It's larger than the displays that you'll find on most digital cameras—4 inches diagonally—and sharp at 1,152k dots. I had no complaints about its brightness; using it outside was no problem. Calling it a huge step up from the 1.5-inch, 16k-dot display used by the original Lytro is a serious understatement.

Wi-Fi is built-in, but the functionality is fairly limited. You can view images stored on the camera via an iOS app (sorry Windows Phone and Android users—there's no app for you at this time), but it's a slow process. It took about 10 seconds for each image to be viewable on my iPhone, and there's no caching involved—if you move from a picture to another, and then back to the one you were viewing previously, you'll have to endure that wait time again. The app also make it possible to upload images from the Lytro to the company's cloud service (so others can view and interact with photos via the Web), using your phone's cellular or Wi-Fi connection as a bridge.

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Image Quality and Conclusions

Editing Tools and Image Quality

While you can certainly take an image straight from the camera and share it via the Lytro cloud service without making any edits, you may find that you'll need to spend time using the Lytro Desktop application (available for Windows and OS X) to make adjustments to photos before unleashing them onto the world. The camera captures images in Raw format, which leaves some room for adjustment to exposure after the fact. You don't have nearly as much control as you'd get with Raw files from a good D-SLR—applying too much exposure adjustment easily creates blown highlights and introduces severe purple color fringing into an image.

Lytro Desktop includes basic photo editing tools. You can adjust exposure, crop and rotate images, set white balance, and control contrast, highlight, shadow, white, and black levels. There are also tools to adjust sharpness, reduce noise, convert images to monochrome, and adjust color saturation on a channel-by-channel basis.

And then there are some tools that are specific to light-field photography. You can dial in depth of field from f/1.0 all the way down to f/16, so you can adjust how shallow the depth of field is in the image. There's also a Virtual Camera section which includes tilt and rotation controls. The former adds a virtual tilt effect to images, so that you can leave just a thin strip of the photo in focus at a time. You can control the orientation of this strip—that is, rotate around an axis—via the rotation slider. This will only have an effect if there is some tilt applied. The tool doesn't give you as much control as you would get with a real tilt-shift SLR lens or a technical camera with movements, but it can be used to isolate focus in certain situations. I like the ability to keep the headstone of President James Buchanan in focus in the image above, while blurring the overhanging branches on top. But my attempts at locking down focus on a diagonal in an image were failures.

Lytro continues to add tools to the development suite. The newest entry is Focus Spread. It is supposed to allow you to isolate multiple subjects or points of focus in an image like you would when shooting at a shallow depth of field, while maintaining a blurry background. I'll be damned if I could get it to work right, even after watching a tutorial video. What's even more frustrating is that you can't use the Undo button to take a step back with this feature—if you mess up and aren't able to get the image back to the way you want it, the only option is to click Revert to Original, which resets all develop settings.

I had a shot that would have been perfect for this effect, but even after spending an hour moving sliders around, I wasn't able to get the promised results. You can blame this on me, but I'm more of the opinion that the tutorial video (which, if you watch, has some laughable dialogue) does more to obfuscate the technique than to clarify it. Lytro bills Focus Spread as a revolutionary feature, but it's only revolutionary if it's intuitive to use. As it stands, the tool needs a lot of work to bring it to that level.

The software has another issue, and that's with import speed. If you've gone out and shot a bunch of images, expect to wait a good amount of time for them to import and be ready for editing. On the latest model Retina 5K iMac, each image takes about 30 seconds to import via a USB 3.0 card reader. If you've got an older computer that time increases; a 2009 model quad-core iMac with a USB 2.0 card reader required 90 seconds for each image. Once images are loaded they're pretty quick to edit; you may just want to plan on watching a movie or taking a nap while a day's worth of photos import if you don't have the latest hardware on your desk.

In addition to refocusing, the Lytro software allows you to slightly alter the perspective of an image. If you ask me, it's the best thing that the technology is capable of. Moving the mouse around when viewing an image shifts the angle of view just slightly, not too different than if you were walking around the scene. It's more convincing to me than most 3D effects that require you to wear glasses, and really does add something to photos. The same effect can be shown in animations that the software creates—think of them as the Ken Burns Effect with an extra dimension. The Lytro software automatically creates an animation for each photo, but you can tweak it to your liking with different camera movements and focus effects.

The Illum uses a 40-megaray image sensor that's 1/1.2-inches in size. That's a big sensor for a fixed lens camera; it sits in between the smaller 1/1.7-inch imagers found in midrange compacts like the Nikon Coolpix P340 ($149.00 at Amazon) and the larger 1-inch chips in premium models like our favorite pocket compact, the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-RX100 III ($598.00 at Amazon) . Both of those models offer excellent image quality, especially when you consider their pocket-friendly designs, but the Illum isn't in the same class. When you take away the refocusing and perspective shift aspects of its images, you're left with low-resolution photos that lack detail and texture. If you output a flat image to make a print you'll get a 4-megapixel JPG. Depth-of-field control aside, the image quality lags well behind what you'll get from any decent, modern smartphone. A camera is only as good as the images it's capable of capturing, and from that perspective, for all its technological bells-and-whistles, the Lytro Illum's image quality is just about as good as a digital compact from the early part of the 21st century.

The Illum uses standard SD, SDHC, and SDXC memory cards, and it features a removable, rechargeable battery; both of which are pluses when compared with the original model, which relied on internal storage and a non-replaceable battery. A dedicated battery charger isn't included, however, so you'll need to plug the camera into a wall and charge the battery using the included AC adapter and USB 3.0 cable. If you're looking for video recording support, look elsewhere; the Illum doesn't support it.

Conclusions

The Lytro Illum is the second light-field camera with which I've shot, and like its predecessor I found it to be a frustrating experience. It's a $1,600 camera that has a few neat tricks up its sleeve, but at the end of the day, those tricks aren't compelling enough to make up for its poor image quality. Its software is slow to import photos, and some of the editing tools that it provides are difficult to use effectively. Lytro has touted its technology as the photography of the future, and many have latched on to the promise of an image that can be refocused after capture as a concept. But autofocus systems in modern D-SLRs and mirrorless cameras are fantastic—if you're spending this much on a camera, it's not going to miss focus that often.

And then there's the quality of the images. The Illum captures low-resolution images that don't show a lot of detail and texture. The company bills the photos as Living Pictures, but the lack of clarity makes them dead to my eyes, even lacking the lo-fi charm of the toy film cameras that many artists adore. There's also the issue of authorship to consider; yes, it's possible to output a flat JPG image that can't be refocused, but why shoot that with the Lytro? The ability to adjust focus—and more importantly, perspective—is what sells this camera. But what if you only want to allow the viewer to adjust the perspective, and keep the focus locked in place? With the current software, that's not possible. Not every shot benefits from the Illum's most obvious trick.

Lytro has promised to revolutionize photography, but has now failed to do so with two products in a row. Some have bought into its promise as the image capture device of the future, but to me it's the emperor with no clothes. If you're really in love with the idea of the Illum, you can spend your money on it; nothing I write will stop you. But what if you're just intrigued by the concept? Like its predecessor, my advice is to skip this model. If there's a third Lytro camera that addresses the shortcomings of the Illum, I'll be happy to see it. But for now, there are dozens of superior, traditional digital cameras out there that are better choices. These include our favorite mirrorless camera, the Olympus OM-D E-M1 ($799.95 at Amazon) , which is smaller, about the same price when you add a lens, blows away the Illum in terms of resolution, and focuses almost instantly. And there are great fixed-lens models on the market, like the Sony RX10 and Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ1000 ($497.99 at Amazon) , both of which offer a long zoom range just like the Illum, in bodies that are actually a bit smaller in size.

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