Lytro is the Foveon of this decade
Many folks, including myself, have been aware of Lytro since the papers their technology is based upon have come out. Lytro is not magic. By capturing a complete 'light field' with multiple sensors per image pixel, a photographer can selectively re-focus images.
Control over depth of field and focus is incredibly important. Understanding this is part of how a person progresses forwards as a photographer. Lytro advances this.
On the other hand, Lytro does not do this for free. There's a resolution cost involved that means that you give up total resolution. There are consequences. I am forced to recall the Foveon sensor design of the past decade, where everybody focused on the positive resolution advantages but completely ignored that there are plenty of cases where it didn't work.
if you take a 12 megapixel dSLR that gives you decent results at pixel-peeping levels of zoom as long as you are careful with focus, you will get a better, higher-resolution image without Lytro. Brute force, both in terms of manual focusing and Bayer patterns, actually works quite well most of the time.
The technology might work really well to make an 8 megapixel cellphone sensor work better. Because, honestly, my 8 megapixel cellphone is really only decent looking if you view it at normal screen sizes, so turning an 8 megapixel sensor down into a ~1 megapixel sensor doesn't cost you anything that you'd miss. But even there, my cellphone camera with a mechanical autofocus does good enough.
I see a lot of people talking about how they really want to buy a new camera but don't, because they know the Lytro camera will come out and it'll be awesome. Some of us still remember when Foveon was a hot technology that people really wanted. People talked about how much they wanted a Canon or Nikon body with a Foveon sensor, but only Sigma used it and everybody else stuck to their Bayer pattern sensors. Except for Fuji, but even there the advantages of Fuji's sensors never managed to compete with raw brute force improvements. And now people are doing the same delay on purchasing a perfectly good camera or playing armchair quarterback about Lytro instead.
