Barry_Green
Moderator
Well, of course it can't have pixel shifting; it's a single chip. You need 3 chips to be able to take advantage of the spatial offset between chips.
But single-system bayer patterns have never been described as a way to increase quality -- everybody has always wanted the 3-chip camera over the 1-chip for very good reasons!
Wha? No no no no no. It's a single-sensor bayer de-mosaic system. It won't be anywhere near 1920x1080 by the time the de-mosaic'ing is done.
I mean, yes it's a 1920 x 1080 chip, but that's only in monochrome! You've got to do a very pixel-shift-like process to turn that into a color image. But unlike pixel shift, which gains resolution, the de-mosaic process loses res. Heck, just laying the bayer filter over the sensor basically causes you to lose res, because you start with a green resolution that's 1/2 the res of the chip (since two of every four pixels have a green filter over them) and red and blue resolution that's 1/4 the res of the chip. So you've got a 960x1080 green source, and a 960x540 red source, and a 960 x 540 blue source. Nowhere near true 1920x1080 color res (which would be possible if you had three 1920x1080 chips; with the bayer pattern on a single chip you get 1/2-1/4-1/4). And then you have to basically pixel-shift that all around to try to guess what the actual color should be, using nearest-neighbor or bicubic or spline algorithms, all to magically reconstruct what the proper color value should be for each "macro-pixel". It's worse than pixel shift, because at least with a 3-CCD pixel shift system you have color information for each pixel on each CCD, all simultaneously; with a bayer pattern only one color can be sensed for each pixel. Demosaicing algorithms are pretty good, so it's not as dire as it sounds, but I'd guess that it'll probably end up losing 20-30% through the bayer filter and resultant demosaic processing. Still not bad, competitive with the other systems, but come on, to imply that it'd be anywhere near a full 1920x1080 is just not going to be accurate; neither would it be accurate to imply that a de-mosaic'd bayer sensor is somehow a "pure" type of resolution. We can be excited for this Canon for what it is ($1099 and 24P) but let's not go trying to make it into something it isn't. :thumbsup:
Check out the wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demosaicing
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The only real downside to this camera is that it doesn't have a focus ring.
