This Weird Little Camera Promised a Photo Future That Never Arrived

In 2012, a new company called Lytro tried to shake up the camera market. It was meant to be something of a photo revolution, but six years later the dream was over. I dug out my old Lytro to see how it holds up.

What Was Lytro?

Lytro was a company formed in 2006 with the goal of bringing light field cameras to market. As the name implies, light field photography captures information about the “light field” within the scene, measured in “megarays.” This includes information about light intensity and what direction the light rays are traveling.

While standard photography records far less information about the light field, light field photography enables a very special gimmick. Cameras made by Lytro allowed you to refocus the image after pressing the shutter, in essence eliminating the problem of missing focus. One image, several focus points.

This “shoot now, focus later” approach is a bit like RAW photography in that the more information that is captured in a scene, the more potential there is to make changes in post. Lytro brought two cameras to market, 2012’s original model which is reported as the “F01” when you plug it into a computer, and the more advanced Lytro Illum in 2015.

The model I have is the original Lytro F01, which launched at $399. I didn’t buy the camera at launch, I picked it up four years later for $79.99 for a review when the cost was significantly discounted. The camera is the most basic example of its kind with a paltry 8GB internal storage, but the fixed 8x optical zoom lens and constant aperture of f/2 over the whole focal range are impressive.

The 11 “megaray” sensor produces square images that measure 1080×1080, of which you can shoot about 350 before you need to empty the storage. The camera has a distinctive square “barrel” shape that’s quite unlike a standard camera, a relatively poor quality touchscreen LCD display (with horrific light bleed), two buttons (power and a shutter), and a touch-sensitive swipe pad for controlling zoom.

Lytro followed this up with the Illum, a much larger camera that looked a lot more like a regular digital SLR or mirrorless. It captured 40 “megaray” images in a more traditional aspect ratio at a maximum size of 2450×1634. The Illum also cost $1,600 at launch, which might explain why you might not have heard of it.

Why the Lytro Fell Flat

While $399 and $1,600 don’t seem like a lot of money for a cutting-edge camera in 2025, the Lytro was brand new at the time. The technology was relatively unproven and the resulting images were small and grainy even in 2012. You had to really buy into the concept of light field photography in order to get excited about it.

Unfortunately for Lytro, not a lot of people did. I’ve never seen another Lytro camera in the wild, and I’d never seen one before I stuck my hand into the bargain bin in 2016. They’re a neat little curio for collectors of all things photography, but they’re not a practical camera.

Taking photos with a Lytro is a bit of a painful experience. The screen is tiny and of poor quality, with absolutely awful viewing angles. While focus isn’t such a huge concern, because light field, making the most of the technology is. Your images need depth of field to work as light field photographs.

That is, you need a good separation between foreground and background in order to make the most of the effect. This is good practice for any kind of photographer, but you have to ask yourself: am I just taking these photos so I can switch between the background and the foreground a few times? The answer, for me, was almost always yes.

Arguably the biggest drawback to the Lytro is that the gimmick was very one-sided. Lytro’s images have to be accessed via Lytro’s own software (you can’t even mount the drive to import them manually, more on this in a bit). Once you’ve got the images into Lytro Desktop, you need to import them and then process them.

Now you can edit them by picking a point of focus, tweak any other sliders you’d normally associate with editing a photo, and then export them as a flat image. Once upon a time, you could share to 500px, Facebook, and Lytro’s own website. Unsurprisingly, these don’t work anymore.

You can now accomplish a lot of what the Lytro promised with modern smartphone cameras. The iPhone shoots flat images with a high aperture, then applies selective “Portrait” bokeh to mimic the shallow depth of field effect. It should come as little surprise that more than a decade of smartphone camera development yields drastically better results.

Who knows what Lytro images would be like if the company was given the same amount of time to cook, though?

Using a Lytro in 2025

In terms of user experience, using a Lytro in 2025 is a lot like using a toy camera. As long as you don’t expect the pristine results, it can still be a blast.

The camera’s size and weight make it easily pocketable, but the magnetic lens cap is very easy to lose. The interface is slow and clunky, but you can ignore most settings and stick to the zoom slider and shutter button instead. The battery (and storage) is all internal, so your mileage may vary depending on how much usage the camera has seen.

By far the worst part of the equation is a reliance on proprietary third-party software. I headed to the Lytro Meltdown website to grab the last good version of Lytro Desktop, since the company website has long gone. Though the Mac version downloads and launches, installing the required helper app throws an error on macOS Sequoia. You might have more luck on older macOS versions.

So I booted up Windows 11 in Parallels Desktop and installed the last good version of the Windows app instead. That worked a treat, once I’d connected my Lytro I was able to import, process, and edit my photos. Unfortunately, you have to do this at USB 2.0 speeds via a micro USB connection.

Ironically all of my old pictures were still there, from the first time I ever laid hands on the camera. It’s sad to say that, to date, I’ve only got 49 light field photos. There will also come a day when accessing these will get even harder since the Windows app will inevitably stop working too.

Another Bullet Point in the History of Cameras

The Lytro was a neat idea, but ultimately one that failed to set the world on fire. Light field photography still exists today through companies like Raytrix, with applications in science like microscopes and gas spectrometry. It could be argued that the company changed very little in terms of the consumer photography landscape, but bringing two cutting-edge and functional products to market is still quite an achievement.

For the camera nerds out there, a Lytro is a fascinating bit of kit that’s fun to play with but don’t be surprised if you put it down for a decade. The reliance on proprietary software may have been necessary at the time, but it’s now the most frustrating part of the equation.