Digital BW, The Print

schrochem wrote:


> Now to pose a question I have been wondering about: if a sensor were 
> made specifically for B&W, what would be changed?

I'd propose an answer to this question. Such a sensor would have no 
Bayer mosaic, and would have a user-removable IR blocking filter (or no 
blocking filter at all). In my ideal camera, it would have an 
anti-aliasing filter (referred to as "blur" filter here earlier), though.

This would send B&W photographers back to their color filters, of course 
- which I think would be a good thing in many respects.

Regarding expense: Such sensors are made by the thousands; Sony is an 
especially prominent supplier. Such a camera would still be more 
expensive than a color version, but I don't see any obvious reason for 
it to be vastly more so. Considering the sensor types that Nikon were 
using about a year or year and a half ago, there were some off the shelf 
non-Bayer Sony sensors that looked very close to what was being used, 
down to being pin-compatible. This suggests to me that Nikon might 
pretty easily substitute one of these for the sensors they were using, 
and issue a B&W version of an existing camera. Not sure if this could 
easily be done by Canon or not.


> If we knew what 
> would be changed perhaps there is a filter set that can be used 
> to "alter" what the sensor sees.....

For a "standard" filter to use with a Bayer mosaic, I would think that 
you'd want a green-pass filter with an asymmetrical U-shaped extinction 
curve - which would block, say, 75% of red and 50% of blue. And you'd 
want the inverse of that filter; a green-block that passes red and blue 
to those proportions.

Just scanning through one of my catalogs here I think this is going to 
be pretty hard to find at reasonable cost.

--
Jeff Medkeff
Eagle River, Alaska