Old Technology Modernizes a Camera Sensor - NYTimes.com

Fuji has reached back into film history to tweak a digital light sensor technology that appears in the new $600 Fuji X20 consumer camera.

A camera?s light sensors are made of an array of tinier photo sensors usually set to detect red, green or blue light. Those smaller sensors are most often laid out in an orderly grid pattern called a Bayer array.

That causes a problem. When the orderly array of sensors takes a picture of some equally orderly patterns, say, a houndstooth jacket, or close parallel lines, an irregular wavy shadow or rainbow seems to appear over the image. That is called a moir? pattern.

There are a lot of ways to avoid the moir? pattern, but they degrade picture quality, often by making it a little fuzzy. In digital cameras, that is often accomplished with an optical low pass filter, a translucent filter which restricts light.

Old fashioned analog photographs didn?t get a moire pattern because the crystals in film and photo paper aren?t even in size and placement. That randomness breaks up the moire effect.

So Fuji built a new sensor employing what it knew from the film business. Instead of using the Bayer array, it created a pattern called the X-Trans sensor which lays out the red green and blue photo sensors in a way that simulates the randomness of analog film.

That allows Fuji to remove the low pass filter, which ? according to Fuji ? means higher resolution and less graininess than on photos taken with the the X10, the cameras new X20 replaces.

The X-Trans array sensor had appeared on last year?s X-Pro 1, which lists for $1,400 for the body alone. It is also on this year?s X100S, which lists for $1,300.

There is a trade off though. Photo editing products like Photoshop are made to work on shots taken using Bayer arrays. So you either must shoot JPEG images (not RAW) or add a step to processing, using Fuji software to translate your RAW image for use in Photoshop, Lightroom, or the like.

The X20 does claim other virtues. For one, Fuji says it has the fastest auto focus in its class (we are talking winner by tenths of a second here). Another feature should appeal to people who don?t like digging through menus for camera functions. The user of an X20 accesses a lot of features through knobs and dials mounted on the X20?s rangefinder-style body rather than using screen menus.

Source: http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/24/old-technology-modernizes-a-camera-sensor/

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