 Light field photography is sort of a complicated idea to explain. Essentially the idea is that instead of capturing just one 2D plane of light with one subject in focus, a camera can capture everything, the light and the direction it's moving. You don't think about focusing, ever, and you'll never have a blurry photo again. Theoretically. The Illum is technically Lightro's second camera, after the odd kaleidoscopic camera it released two years ago. But this is the first real product it's made, the first one made for people to use for serious work. It's also the first Lightro that looks like a real camera. Or at least a camera crossed with a futuristic weapon. The Illum is a big, heavy, black and blue device. I really like its look, actually. Most of its body is its lens, a huge round cylinder where everything special about light field photography takes place. It has a few familiar camera trappings, like a hot shoe and a shutter button, plus a handful of customizable wheels and buttons, but most of what you do with the Illum you do on the 4 inch display on the back. It's angled so you can see it from above, the standard position for the Illum is about chest high held in two hands, and it articulates so you can hold it at almost any angle. Virtually every setting change, like white balance or shooting mode, happens on this screen. It's a good touch screen and a nice, clean, simple interface, but I do still like having a few buttons and dials on the camera. More than almost any camera, there are two distinct steps to using the Illum, shooting and processing. You're going to need both. But let's start with shooting. The Illum has a 1 inch sensor and a high end Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. Its big lens extends from 30 to 250mm and it shoots at F2 all the time, but gives you the ability to later focus as high as F16. Basically there's crazy range in this camera, unlike almost any other on the planet. For regular, plain pictures like we've always shot, the Illum isn't very good. Its 40 mega rays sensor doesn't produce especially sharp images, and it's pretty bad in low light. But using the Illum to take standard DSLR pictures is a waste of your money and Lightro's technology. This camera is meant for what Lightro calls living pictures, which let you, and ultimately anyone, play around with perspective and focus inside a photo. It tells a different story as long as you do it right. Doing it right means having at least two subjects in your photo, one close to the camera, one further away. It often means shooting from below, where you'll get a better sense of depth and distance in the image. There's a lot of staging required in getting a light field photo just right. You can't quite just aim and click like you can with a regular digital camera. That's kind of a problem, honestly, and it's partly a solvable one. The Illum has what's called a Lightro button, which maps the refocusable range of your shot in blue and orange colors on the screen. It gives you an immediate sense of what you'll be able to shoot, and how you'll be able to interact with it later. And it does make getting the right shot a lot easier, and it also kills the battery. The Illum's autofocus is essentially useless. There's no image stabilization either, which makes shooting even harder. You're better off just focusing manually, which adds an entirely new level of complexity to this camera. But with the right time and effort, and a lot of trial and error, it's possible to get great photos from the Illum. And the effect when it works is amazing. The camera can focus on things literally touching its lens, and with so much zoom and such bright aperture, there's really nothing that's not in play. Except, you know, low light. The Illum's biggest problem isn't what it's capable of, though, or even the challenge it can be to take great shots. That's all part of the fun. The real problem is that this product is just flat out not stable. It crashes too frequently, it freezes to the point of needing the battery to be pulled. It can be really slow to load pictures, slow to shoot them, and just slow to turn on in the first place. This camera is plenty complicated as it is, and sure, it's still a new technology, but it's a $1500 camera and it needs to get those things right. The same goes for the processing software, which is the other half of the Illum equation. Lytro Desktop lets you organize your photos, edit them with a set of basic tools, and share them to Lytro's site or to anywhere on the web so people can see and play with them. You can also use it to animate the photos, guiding them through particular perspective and focus shifts, and then sharing the finished product as a movie. It's fairly simple software, but it's impossibly clunky. Importing a lot of files at once cripples even a crazy powerful gaming laptop. The whole thing crashes all the time, and it's all just slow. Each light field picture is about 53 megabytes, takes about 30 seconds to import and process, and can be a huge hassle to edit. If you're willing to put up with its $1499 price tag and its many, many headaches, buy a Lytro Illum. This thing is a glimpse at the future, when photos will truly come alive. And Lytro might even be the company to pull it off. But pulling it off will mean making it easier to shoot beautiful photos, photos that are sharper and clearer in their own right, and a user experience that doesn't make you want to pull your hair out. Light field photography is incredible. I hope it takes over, but I wouldn't tell anyone but the craziest photographers to really get into it just yet.