Digital BW, The Print

OK, the whole point of doing a monochrome sensor is to REMOVE the  
Anti-Aliasing filter because there is NO color aliasing. There is no  Bayer Filter Array 
on the sensor to start with, so why would you want to fuzzy  up the image?? 
The main strength of a mono sensor is it's twice as sharp as  a color one. IOW, 
it take twice as many Bayer Well Sites to equal the resolution  of a given 
number of mono well site, assuming the optics can resolve both.
 
As a Foveon mentor back in 1999, after being an early Kodak adopter, I  
learned this lesson well by comparing a cropped 3.2 megapixel (1.6k X 2K)  capture 
on the 3-chip prism camera, to a PhaseOne Lightphase AND  a Kodak 560. The 
Phase One had a 6 MPx Philips Sensor and NO AA  filter. The 560 had a 6 MPx 
sensor with AA filter. By far, Kodak's was the worst  performer. Foveon was the 
best, by a nudge, over the Phase One (that back was on  a Hasselblad). We are 
talking about $30,000 outfits here and not today's amazing  camera that cost less 
than $1,000. So those of us who spent that kind of cash  were SERIOUS about 
digital performance and had to make sure we had clients to  pay for it.
 
By the same token, Foveons X3 color sensor in the Sigma SD-10 (best cheap  
B&W capture also) has full color resolution at every well site, and so, at  3.5 
MPx native capture, performs as well or better than most 8 MPx cameras as  far 
as resolution BECAUSE there is not AA or BAYER filter array.
 
Back in 2000, Foveon had a prototype 22x22mm sensor that was monochrome. It  
was all CMOS, 4k x 4k (16 megapixels). Greg Gorman did a shot of a Cowboy in 
the  proto camera that had accepted Canon lenses. They made a 4 foot by 8 foot 
print  (cropping out 1/2 the image area captured by the sensor!!). At 
Photokina,  everyone thought the image was better than 4x5 film. It would have taken a 
36  MPx (6k by 6k) BFA color sensor to perform better than this, assuming the 
optics  could do it.
 
This may bee deemed as my opinion, but I have image files to prove it. I'm  
currently on my 30th digital camera in 10 years.
 
I only wish the Foveon technology would catch on and they could make bigger  
sensors. This way you would have all the shapness benefits of a mono sensor,  
with all of the post-process manipultations of scene renderings during the  
B&W conversion in Photoshop.
 
In the mean time, I suspect that if Ken Boydston of MegaVision decides to  
make a Mono Back that also does IR captures, like everything else he has done,  
someone will copy it.
 
Claude
 
In a message dated 7/10/2005 10:47:24 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time,  
DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com writes:

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.


 


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