My question: where is the advantage? Is there any way Leica could develop a purely B&W sensor that had advantages that it wouldn't have if it did color as well?
On Sat, Mar 17, 2012 at 12:18 PM, Mark Roberts <[email protected]> wrote: > 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. -- Steve Desjardins -- 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.
