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Blur by Bayer Pattern Demosaicing
Every major camera brand as of 2020 utilizes a variant of the Bayer Pattern matrix, in which half the pixels are green, a quarter are blue, and a quarter red (there are variants with 4 colors but these have largely gone out of favor).
The Bayer Pattern sensor measures one monochrome value at each photosite; one brightness level filtered to one color (red or green or blue). Therefore, the Bayer sensor has much lower color resolution than simple megapixel math would suggest.
A distinctly different approach is Sigma’s true-color Foveon sensor, used only in Sigma’s cameras such as the Sigma DP Merrill and Sigma dp Quattro. The Sigma true-color Foveon sensor can sample red, green and blue at every photosite. Sigma rates the Foveon sensor as having a 2X resolution factor, suggesting that a 3MP Foveon sensor is equivalent to a 6MP Bayer sensor. That is arguably true for subjects having strong primary colors, but I deem it overly optimistic in the general case. A more realistic overall rating of the resolution advantage is somewhere around 1.5X. See the review of the Sigma DP-2 in diglloyd Mirrorless Cameras.
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- Eases into photographic challenges with an introductory section.
- Covers aspects of digital sensor technology that relate to getting the best image quality.
- Technique section discusses every aspect of making a sharp image handheld or on a tripod.
- Depth of field and how to bypass depth of field limitations via focus stacking.
- Optical aberrations: what they are, what they look like, and what to do about them.
- MTF, field curvature, focus shift: insight into the limitations of lab tests and why imaging performance is far more complex than it appears.
- Optical aberrations: what they are, what they look like, and what to do about them.
- How to test a lens for a “bad sample”.
Intrigued? See Focusing Zeiss DSLR Lenses For Peak Performance, PART ONE: The Challenges, or (one topic of many) field curvature.
