Digital BW, The Print

But in a typical digital camera there's a color filter placed over the chip
such that your 4 pixel grid would be:

[R][G]
[G][B]

...so there's no way to take a pure grayscale image, because there's a color
filter stuck on the chip. The camera can't not interpolate in greyscale
mode, because the only data it's capable of capturing is alread filtered for
color. See: http://www.foveon.com/interp.html

-Jason

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Todd Flashner [mailto:tflash@...]
> Sent: Thursday, February 07, 2002 1:23 AM
> To: DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com
> Subject: Re: [Digital BW] Re: Digicam in BW mode, how to test
>
> Say your sensor is a grid of two sensors across by two down. In grayscale
> mode you get a 4 pixel capture. You have 4 pixels of detail,
> represented by
> one channel which has 4 pixels.
>
> If the camera then applies an algorithm to give each of those
> pixels an RGB
> component, that requires interpolation, and you'll end up 3 channels at 4
> pixels each. You've added color channels, through interpolation, which may
> or may not contain an accurate representation of the color they
> are tying to
> create, but you've added no detail.