[font color=\'#000000\']>>To me, the huge win for the foveon chip is the lack of
>>artifacts.
The biggest being moire.
>>DPReview has some extensive threads on this on this topic.
>> According to many there, since the Foveon images lack the
>>Bayer interpolation artifacts and have true pixel-level color
>>rendition, they upsize and print much better than Bayer
>>images with twice the resolution.
like most things, the truth is sort of grayish. The foveon has to do some guesswork of its own to sort out what responce belongs to what color. Reds seem to suffer most, even on ISO100 setting from what I can see. It remains of course true that they are doing more measurements, so one would hope that that shows in the result. If X3 can get the horrible shadow color noise (not so much luminance noise) under control, then we are in for a great future.
It is kind of sad, that the discussion on dpreview has ended in fundamentalistic statements, like the X3 does measure better therefore Bayer interpolation is bad and will have no future, instead of looking at results, I tend to look at prints. If a bayer sensor with all its shortcommings delivers a very good result, then it is nice to know that a much more complex sensor can deliver a potentially better one with less pixels, but does it matter? The same holds of course the other way round, if an X3 can deliver in less storage MBs a better image than a larger Bayer sensor with more storage requirements, why bother with a "larger" imager. So far all printing ends in upsampling.
First X3 results seem very positive to me, but actual comparisons, like the one of the japanse Photographer Yamada, leave quite mixed feelings. Having super perfect pixels is nice but upsampling (guessing the missing data) is like water in wine. At least the Bayer source has some information from those extra pixels that still have to be invented. For me the whole reasoning that X3s have to invent less data, is only a major factor if one talkes about the same pixel count, then an x3 is a great great step forward.
I am sure that soon we will all know what the X3 delivers and what not, hopefully the emotions, will go out of the discussion.
>>I'm just stunned by the amazing pixel-level clarity, which I
>>have never seen from any Bayer image, even the D60.
Bright future ahead it seems. Did you ever look at Kodak 760? pictures without AA filter? There is more potential in Bayer then meets the eye. (If I only could believe that from >14MP one does not need an AA filter)
Stefan Klocke[/font]