My Lytro camera arrived today; I preordered it months ago but it took them a while to get production going. It is a gorgeous piece of hardware, sleek and minimal and comfortable, fun to hold and play with. It’s almost immediately obvious how to use it, and the use of a touch screen viewfinder is one of those ideas that instantly obsoletes the array of tiny multi-function buttons on other cameras.

The rest of the experience has not been so impressive. Picture quality is disappointing: for a camera whose primary feature is the ability to focus in software, the focus just isn’t very good. Everything has a soft-edged quality, like you’ve zoomed in too far. Am I doing it wrong, or does the focus system just not work very well? The desktop software is slow – the long processing time is forgivable, since there’s obviously a lot of fancy math required to render this sensor data down to a 2D image, but it’s still a shock to see the process of importing a photo and saving it as a JPEG take as long as it might have twelve or fifteen years ago.