A bit of context why this is a "DSLR challenger" and is probably the first nail in the coffin of SLR cameras...

As professional photographers are well aware, the ultimate bottleneck to the quality of the photo is how big the lens is. It's a physical limit, the angular resolution and light gathering capabilities of an imaging system are limited by the diameter of the lens. This is why for all its decades of technological advances, the lenses in the SLR market are just as ginormous as they were 50 years ago.

What this camera does is replaces one large lens with an array of smaller ones, much like telescope arrays replaced individual large telescopes. The effective diameter of the 'lens' is now dictated by the size of the camera array. With a bit of software, they're able to take the 16 individual smartphone-quality images and merge them into a single one whose optical characteristics rival an SLR lens.

In a few years, expect to find an array of cameras like that on the back of your smartphone, and your DSLR in the rubbish bin. Other than being way more convenient, the smaller lenses mean that you can use very good materials and very precise lens designs which would cost tens of thousands of dollars if attempted with bigger lenses like on SLRs. The professional grade cannon L series 70-200 lens has 29 elements inside it, and only 5 of them are 'ulta low dispersion' because they cost so much. An identical lens built at the scale of the Light camera can have every element as UD and still cost only 10 dollars or so to manufacture.