Bruce Dayton wrote:
Hello Pieter,
One thing you are not factoring in to this issue is the output side. When the output is digital, you have the same basic problem. Each "pixel" is only one color. What you are really referring to is a dithering pattern. All inkjet printers do this, monitors do this and I believe digital mini-labs do this. So in fact, the color doesn't have to be faked as much as it has to be patterned. The downside to this is that certain "patterns" (especially man-made) could come out looking wrong. The natural random nature of film grain tends to hide this rather than accentuate it. I don't think the Foveon crowd has quite as much advantage as you think. They still have to create a "dither pattern" from the sensor data as each pixel can only store 1 color.
One correction here, the Foveon has a special photosite technology that allows it to capture a full R,G,B pixel on each photosite, whereas everyone else has a single R or G or B value per photosite, which forces an interpolation of adjacent sites to get a full RGB value, so the color is based on several photosites instead of just 1. This is why the Foveon crowd is so passionate about their stuff. If they came up with a 6Mp Foveon chip with the same size as the 10D or *istD chip, it would blow the socks off those chips. But the technology is still in its infancy, the best they have is a 3Mp or so chip right now with I think a 1.6 factor. Only time will tell which technology will win out, Bayer or Foveon. I for one am happy with my *istD, but I wouldn't mind Pentax putting in a 6Mp Foveon chip in the next DSLR. :)
Using film as a beginning but moving it to digital output is not much different than the Foveon, capturing all three colors at 1 pixel point but then creating a dither pattern out of it. Either the scanner or Foveon chip do this. I suspect that the layout pattern of the CCD/CMOS chip pretty much regulate this.
In the end, it all comes out in the wash. The only real comparison would be between a purely analog film process vs a digital capture/output.
My local labs no longer do analog. That means that my film is at a disadvantage. It is subject to their scanner/software limitations. The only alternative is to scan and manipulate the images myself.
Food for thought.
