[olliej]

Nah what killed Lytro was that it was very expensive, while also being low resolution, while also not really offering a feature that people really wanted. People basically just want the multi focal plane stuff that modern phones do but cheaper and at higher resolution. I don’t think people have ever really demonstrated a desire to share images that could have the focal plane changed by the viewer, but even when you could with this format the functional number of planes was actually quite small.

Also the device itself looked nice, but it was fairly hard to use and the view finder screen was a fairly bad lcd even at the time.

The fact that they weren’t giving away decoders at the time is pretty much a given, especially given how much emphasis they put on the “algorithms” they used.