I have had a late start but I am trying to follow the twists and turns of this thread.
The virtues of the AA filter have been affirmed and denied, with religious certainty on both sides. One argument in favor of removing or omitting the AA filter in landscape photography is that the fine geometric patterns, such as in fabrics, are not present in the natural scene and thus aliasing is negligible. However, sampling theory, as well as simulation, shows that this statement is false. When an image is under sampled, components above the Nyquist frequency are erroneously used in forming the digital image, appearing as lower frequency information. This is aliasing. Even if one doesn’t recognize it as such, it is a distortion of the image. These distortions might be pleasing in some case and lead some to prefer a camera without an AA filter. But one cannot be certain that the camera without the AA filter will always yield the more pleasing result; it will depend strongly on the scene being photographed.
thank you, this could possibly sum everything up.
perhaps having no AA filter leads to "distortions", but in photography most of us never strove to capture a scene exactly as it is.
There is something to be said for the intangible sense of satisfaction one gets from seeing an image straight out of the camera looking "right" without having to post process the hell out of it.
Many people shoot not for scientific reasons, but we shoot to get images which please us, looking for the right cameras which render images the most pleasing way possible. Most people are lazy and prefer not to have to fiddle around so much with images to get them to look good.
And there is something pleasing about the way an AA filterless camera renders images.
I think the vehement disagreement regarding this topic boils down to a few things:
we have a few very scientific minded people here who regard it sacrilegious that some photographers would actually think that aliasing is acceptable and pleasing, and believe that one should strive for a theoretically perfect camera output with the best lens and raw converter possible.
there are others who simply just prefer the look of an AA filterless picture, and perhaps use scientifically inaccurate terms to describe the reason why they feel these images are better.Perhaps *shock* we don't really care for accurate photographs!
Thus the twain shall never meet. I'm happy to stay in the latter camp as long as my images look good.
I'll leave the theoretical debating to you guys