They were founded in 2006, and their first generation cameras were being unloaded on Woot last year, and the there was a flash sale on their second generation yesterday. It'd be great if they finally recognized that a proprietary format was blocking their success, but...
> It'd be great if they finally recognized that a proprietary format was blocking their success, but...
FWIW, I also think that Lytro has been seriously off the mark in how they market the output of their cameras: as weird black-boxes for end-viewers to play with. IMO, the idea that an audience of image viewers want to fiddle with the light-field knobs themselves (e.g. post-shot focus) is actively hurtful of Lytro's products.
The holy grail here is a light field camera that obsoletes the need for focus the way that digital cameras have obsoleted the need for color filters used in B&W film photography[1]. Unfortunately, Lytro's first product was well before its time. Their tech didn't have adequate still-image resolution compared to even a halfway-decent phone camera, certainly not enough to make the focus vs quality tradeoff make much sense vs conventional cameras.
Lytro's approach is worth comparing to Apple's Live Photos in the iPhone 6s. Live Photos clearly aren't for every shooting situation, but AFAICT, they're becoming quite popular for what I'll dub "affective photography": moments of kids, pets, friends, etc. We'll see how well this feature lasts past its novelty phase, but it's got a far better hook into what motivates end-users than Lytro has ever had.
[1] A quick primer: colored filters were used with black and white film to change the relative contrast of different objects in the scene, e.g. sky vs skin tones vs grass, etc. A skillful photographer learned to look at the colors in a scene and pick a filter that would produce the desired B&W rendering. Converting color digital images to B&W allows these rendering decisions to be pushed into post, with more creative freedom than was ever possible with film (or the odd, rare B&W digital sensor).
