Lytro’s new camera Illum changes everything about photography

Two years ago, a little startup called Lytro changed the way the world thought about photography by introducing the world’s first light field camera. Now, they’re doing it all over again with a professional grade model and software platform. After you see what this camera can do, you’ll never look at still pictures the same.

It’s called the Lytro Illum. In a sense, the total package is as much a computer as it is a camera. With a 40-megaray light field sensor, 8x optical zoom range, and high-speed shutter, the image quality is impressive, to say the least. (The first generation Lytro had only an 11-megaray sensor; one megaray equals one million rays of light.) A constant f/2.0 aperature also means you can get impossibly close to your subject and focus on fine levels of detail.

When trying out the Illum, the lens actually touched what was being photographed, and the image still came out crystal clear. Like the original Lytro, this camera makes focusing an afterthought. While the lens does include a focus ring and a zoom ring, the unique megaray sensor collects so much visual information, you can make unprecedented adjustments in postproduction.

The photos are dynamic when viewed through the Lytro app on a tablet. Then, you can take advantage of the parallax effect that gives images a three-dimensional quality. This isn’t just for images you take using some special 3D setting, either. It works for every image, and if you have a 3D-ready screen, you can look at the images in 3D. The camera’s not necessarily cheap, though.

The Lytro Illum will start shipping in July for $1,600, a solid jump in price from the original camera’s list price of $400. (You can buy it on Amazon right now for $200.) When you consider the quality is four times better, though, the math works out. And the camera itself — it’ll blow your mind.