In a decade, light-field cameras and computational photography are going to be the mainstream. As computer power gets faster, smaller, lighter, and more power-efficient, the advantages will exceed optics — maybe not completely in a decade, and probably not in every case in a hundred years, but there will be a crossing point.

But the current technology on the market — the Lytro — is essentially a toy camera serving as a tech preview. You'd buy it in order to tell your grandkids that you had the first camera of that type. It doesn't really do anything useful right now: the images it makes are postage-stamp sized, and the nifty tricks the camera offers only work when you upload the images to the company's special web site. You can't really do anything yourself.

They've promised an SDK but as of Spring 2012 that has not yet materialized. If you're a hacker (in the original sense), you might find that interesting and productive when available. But even then, it'll be more about playing with the technology than getting real photographic results.

That doesn't mean a DSLR is necessarily the only option for good results. You may also be interested in a small-sensor compact camera, or a large-sensor "mirrorless" camera, with or without interchangeable lenses.