It has occurred to me that one of the stupid things about making a digital camera with a black-and-white-only sensor would be that it would be like buying a film camera that would only work with one kind of film. OK, you could have different sensitivity settings, but B&W films had their own sensitivity curves and reacted differently to red, green and blue light. You could change things with filters, of course, but those are not nearly flexible/versatile to make one film emulate the RGB sensitivity curves of another.
In a digital camera you can emulate the looks of different B&W films to some extent by working with the individual RGB curves during raw processing, but the sensor has to capture individual RGB data in the first place - a B&W-only sensor wouldn't permit this so you'd be locked into one "look" forever. If Leica were to make a B&W-only camera, one way around this would be to use a color sensor and implement the B&W limitation in software. That seems a bit silly (not that some people wouldn't buy it anyway). If the Leica rumor turns out to be real, perhaps they are implementing the B&W-only limitation in software but using the kind of sensor Kodak announced a few years ago with a non-Bayer pattern that sacrifices some color sensitivity for greater luminance sensitivity . Here's the DP Review article about it: http://www.dpreview.com/news/2007/6/14/kodakhighsens -- Mark Roberts - Photography & Multimedia www.robertstech.com -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
