Kyle Nagel
New member
This Foveon sensor debate is an old and passionate one from both sides of the fence, I would say conventional sensors are "true" in regards to their effective megapixels, this can be seen by viewing the recorded un-interpolated pixel dimensions, you will see Fuji's dimensions are not 14 mp worth of dimensions without interpolation, theirs is closer to 6 or 7, I believe the camera setting that produces close to 14 mp of resolution states "interpolated" in their specs.
As far as a traditional sensor the way they work is sometimes miss-understood. here is a quote from the Luminous Landscape that actually explains it rather well:
I have played with images from the Foveon sensors and while the colors seem really nice (actually very nice) I find artifacts appear much sooner when enlarged than with a traditional CCD or CMOS sensor.
I'm still not sure how a 4.7 mp sensor can be a 14 mp sensor, it seems like a stretch to me, Just one mans opinion.
Kyle
As far as a traditional sensor the way they work is sometimes miss-understood. here is a quote from the Luminous Landscape that actually explains it rather well:
When a digital camera makes an exposure the imaging chip (whether it's CCD or CMOS) records the amount of light that has hit each pixel, or photo site. This is recorded as a voltage level. The camera's analog to digital circuitry now changes this analog voltage signal into a digital representation. Depending on the camera's circuitry either 12 or 14 bits of data are recorded. Incidentally, if the camera records 12 bits of data then each pixel can handle 4,096 brightness levels (2^12), and if 14 bit then it can record 16,384 different brightness levels (2^14). (To my knowledge no current imaging chip records a true 16 bits worth of data)... ...imaging chips use what is called a Bayer Matrix or colour Filter Array in order to record colour. The way this is done is to place red, blue and green filters over each pixel. Half of the pixels are filtered green and the remainder are either red or blue. Through a very complex algorithm the values recorded by each pixel are compared with its neighbors, and full colour information is derived
I have played with images from the Foveon sensors and while the colors seem really nice (actually very nice) I find artifacts appear much sooner when enlarged than with a traditional CCD or CMOS sensor.
I'm still not sure how a 4.7 mp sensor can be a 14 mp sensor, it seems like a stretch to me, Just one mans opinion.
Kyle
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