I had so much fun with my (original) Lytro camera. For about a month. Then the novelty wore off and it just became a slightly difficult-to-use camera that often

I had so much fun with my (original) Lytro camera. For about a month. Then the novelty wore off and it just became a slightly difficult-to-use camera that often took pictures where none of the 10 focal lengths it offered gave a crisp rendition of the subject. So much for "focusing the picture after the fact." So I thought, hey, that's too bad, but maybe this would be a really great platform for experimenting with computer vision! Or at least I could dig into the file and look for other interesting things to do with the light field photos. Unfortunately, no dice. The thing is not-at-all hackable - at least at the time, they hadn't posted any specs on their file format or specs for the protocol it uses to talk to the computer. If they had, it might have had a serious 2nd life as a toy for makers. Instead, my unit has gone untouched for at least the past 18 months. Considering how quickly I lost interest in it for general photography uses, I never even considered buying the Illum. The things it does differently from a regular camera are, by and large, things a decent photographer doesn't really want. So a consumer product was never going to happen, and even if they had scratched my itch and make a toy for hackers, it would have penned them into a very small niche market in the absolute best case scenario. He made the right choice.