It wasn’t until I brought the Illum to a concert at Brooklyn Bowl that I realized just how quickly I’d bumped into the ceiling of its capabilities. The camera has an ISO range that stretches up to 3200, but images start to break apart with noise at about 1600. The constant-aperture f/2 lens, which is admittedly really nice, is front-heavy and has no image stabilization, so it is hard to keep steady when zoomed all the way to 250mm. You can change the white balance, but only to other presets like "Tungsten" or "Daylight," and the Auto White Balance (the setting I typically use when shooting concerts on my 5D Mark II) is too slow to keep up with the constantly shifting lights of a venue.

You're constantly running into the Illum's limitations

To compensate for all of these issues I turned on the camera’s quick-burst shooting, only to run into more problems. Firing off a few shots back-to-back was fine, but the camera’s buffer would quickly fill up and take far too long to clear, putting me back in what was essentially single-shot mode. To top it all off, at the end of one series of burst photos the Illum decided to shut right off on its own, leaving me worried that I might have just bricked our review unit.

We also started to run into other problems with the desktop editing program, but these (and hopefully the camera's issues) should be resolved with eventual software updates. As frustrating as the entire experience was, I still have hope. I'm left thinking about all the terrible photos that I took growing up, or the times my brother and I would goof around, burning through rolls of film just running around the house taking pictures of whatever. What if we had been doing that with a camera like the Illum, and right now I could pull up an image that I took back then and still explore the room I had been in? Maybe I could click to focus on the bookshelf in the background and see the books I read as a kid, or drag around the perspective of the scene and get a sense of what my old room looked like. Right now it might still feel like a parlor trick, but light-field photography still has a lot of potential. This really is just the beginning.