[bobmcnamara]

> unfortunately they hadn't quite reached the image quality needed for professional photographers.

I always wondered about that - since it works by interleaving pixels at different focal depths, there's always going to be a resolution tradeoff that a single-plane focus camera wouldn't.

It's such a cool idea though, and no more difficult to manufacturer than a sensor + micro lens array.

[summa_tech]

In fact, the Lytro Illum (the big one) had a really nice, very flexible, bright super-zoom lens. If you ever wondered how that was achieved: having the microlens array and a light field sensor (1) allows relaxing so many aberration constraints on the lens that you could have a light, compact super-zoom.

(1) it's not really different focal depths, it's actually more like multiple independent apertures at different spatial locations, each with a lower resolution sensor behind it - stereovision on steroids (stereoids?)