There will have to be some kind of color filtering to get the the sensor
to record different wavelengths in accordance with some semblance of
human vision. I do not think that you will gain all that much
sensitivity over a sensor with normal color filters in a color Bayer
pattern or some other pattern not withstanding. At best will have
something resembling orthochromatic output or maybe pre orthochromatic
when film was so blue sensitive that it over powered /all/ other colors
of the spectrum when recording B&W images.
On 3/18/2012 11:28 AM, Toralf Lund wrote:
On 3/18/12 13:19, Steven Desjardins wrote:
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?
The advantage would be collecting *all* the available light, where a
colour sensor has filters that essentially means some of it is thrown
away, thus increasing the effective sensitivity. Of course, if you end
up using a colour filter in front of the lens anyway, you also give
away something, but you can at least select what is removed (for all
pixels.) You cannot change your mind when you do the post-processing,
though (which is the prime objection.)
Then there is the anti-aliasing filter - if you know you're not going
to do de-mosaicing, I believe you can get rid of that, too, thus
getting pictures that are sharper in one sense. You can install a
colour sensor without such a filter, too - in fact Leica has done that
already - but I'm not sure you can also get rid of the effects it's
supposed to counter-act (in software) without loosing some of the
sharpness.
- T
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
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