Gadgetory

hey guys this is Austin and this is the Lytro loom no it is one of the coolest pieces of tech to come out in quite a while except for the fact that no one actually bought it so when this came out a couple years ago it cost a whopping $1,500 over today you can pick them up for about two or three hundred what makes Lytro special is it is a completely different way of taking a photo so instead of a traditional camera which captures a flat 2d image Lytro actually captures the light rays which sounds a little goofy but it allows you to do is change the focus the depth of field even the perspective after you take the shot and here is the camera itself which is actually bigger than I thought there's almost nothing on here there's a big touchscreen around back a couple of buttons and that's pretty much it it feels like some like concept of a camera versus an actual normal DSLR to put things in perspective this is what the Illuma like compared to a more traditional camera at the sony a6300 as you can see well this is not exactly the smallest camera in the world it absolutely dwarfs it especially with this huge lens before we get started let's see what we actually need to get this thing up and running is actually a kind of a cool unboxing experience there's a lot here we've got a cleaning cloth and it looks like a lens hood as well I can't get over the fact that this just doesn't look like any other camera it's vaguely sort of mirrorless like but with that huge screen around back and essentially no buttons it's a super unique look so we do have an articulating display and since we have no buttons thankfully it is a touchscreen right so if I want can I focus on the camera okay so we took a quick test shot and first guys it looks nice but if I want I can switch focus to Ken Joe over to curvy that's actually really cool so the refocusing thing is definitely nothing new so a lot of smart phones have been able to do a sort of rudimentary version of this by either using multiple cameras or taking a lot of stills and kind of merging them together with this you're actually getting full control of what it looks like and at first glance it's not bad what's interesting about this is that inside it's actually kind of like a smart phone so pound this guy is actually a Snapdragon 801 processor now mind you in 2014 that was little bit more impressive than it is today but that's still a lot of power for a camera so when I start shooting one of the things I noticed is that while it's nice to have a big 4-inch display the viewing are not great especially since it's articulating when I kind of lower it like I can't say anything unless I get right in the sweet spot that's nice although there looks like some weird artifacting so even though this doesn't focus like a traditional camera you still can use the autofocus button on the back as well as tapping to get that initial focus so even though this gives you a lot more flexibility than a traditional camera you do at least have to get it in the rough ballpark as far as focus goes I feel like when I'm shooting from lower angles everything looks a little bit more impressive there's a lot more kind of depth to work with so handling wise it's not bad it might not be the most ergonomic camera in the world however the weight does not run it into plants I say oh it is it's almost like you're trying to walk backwards with a camera or something so what might not be the most ergonomic camera in the world that large grip really does help I'm not so sure how durable this is going to be it's all very very soft touch plastics and rubber and there's definitely a bit of metal here but it seems reasonable maybe not $59 reasonable but definitely $200 reasonable I gotta say this dynamic range is awful like that's the sky is blown out and your face is completely gone I get that this is more of a pro camera and that's cool it's nice to be able to have some of the features where you know you can actually refocus and stuff but image quality doesn't really seem to be on par with something like what you could get out of a DSLR the more I play with this the more I feel like this will be a lot better suited for video so it's actually not totally crazy light doe does have a video camera that they are working on but it's gonna be a lot more high-end than something like this Hoover the idea being able to shoot video and be able to refocus after the shot is really interesting once you're done shooting you need to take your photos into the light show app for Windows or Mac so in like a traditional camera that shoots normal JPEGs here all of your photos have to be processed first my initial instinct is oh god everything's out of focus however I may need to do is click on Ken's face and it looks actually pretty decent so this is actually a really good example of how you get that little bit of depth it's a cool effect I don't really think it's going to make a huge difference in how you would actually save your final image but so you get things something very slightly wrong it's easy enough to just click and adjust it to kind of pull some depth out so just like if you shot Raw on a normal camera you can change things like the white balance the exposure saturation what I want to see is how some of this virtual camera stuff works so you can see here we can almost kind of digitally adjust the aperture that actually looks kind of cool though maybe not quite so extreme so once you I should get these processed you're looking at a picture that's around five megapixels but looking at it it's a little soft so this is shot is a 2500 and honestly it's not really usable I mean you can't see some of this cool focus effect and it's not perfect but it actually does look pretty cool the thing I can't get away from is that the image quality just isn't that great now don't get me wrong this is an incredible piece of technology and for a couple hundred dollars there's definitely a lot worse options out there however at the end of the day the pictures are interesting it does a lot of very cool stuff but the tech just doesn't feel fully baked to me so what do you guys think about Lytro in the Illume devil be sure to let me know in the comments below and I will catch you in the next one