How the Lytro LightField camera performs in low light situations

LightField technology shifts the limits of cameras from hardware to software. In everyday point-and-shoot cameras, Megapixels had a certain (though not omnipotent) explanatory power about the camera’s quality, but in LightField Tech, lightrays are captured with several pixels per ray.
Thus, theoretically, sensor features such as image noise or dead/hot pixels have less of a negative impact – there are still plenty of equivalent pixels around that good software can use to extrapolate the actual color or light intensity of the point of light in three-dimensional space. Theoretically.

As with every other first-generation product, features are improvable.
In the case of low light image quality, there’s unfortunately a lot of space for improvement.

To give you an idea of how the Lytro LightField camera performs and copes low light and completely dark situations, we’ve collected a few images taken under such conditions.
As you can see, some are better, and some are worse. As long as there’s even a dim source of light, image quality is o.k.

Lytro low-light performance

http://pictures.lytro.com/tonyhawk/pictures/38533
https://pictures.lytro.com/LytroMedia/pictures/26526
https://pictures.lytro.com/apc/pictures/19345
https://pictures.lytro.com/apc/pictures/19346
https://pictures.lytro.com/apc/pictures/19347
https://pictures.lytro.com/apc/pictures/19348

https://pictures.lytro.com/uyendang/pictures/26862

Lytro artificial light performance

https://pictures.lytro.com/LytroMedia/pictures/26525
https://pictures.lytro.com/apc/pictures/19357
http://pictures.lytro.com/adamnash/pictures/26152
http://pictures.lytro.com/adamnash/pictures/40578
http://pictures.lytro.com/adamnash/pictures/40576
https://pictures.lytro.com/mugurm/pictures/26567
https://pictures.lytro.com/mugurm/pictures/38886
https://pictures.lytro.com/echeng/pictures/36481
https://pictures.lytro.com/echeng/pictures/30024