It's not some "old 14 megapixel DSLR-level CMOS sensor"! The DP cameras come the Foveon sensors with stacked photodiods rather than standard CMOS sensors which are arranged in the Bayer pattern. Shame on you Engadget for your lackluster reporting!
@jakeshdaddy Yes, but ALSO the 14MP thing is a lie; it's really 14/3 MP (4.7), but all of those pixels being full colour. (A standard 14MP camera really has 14MP, but each one is only one of the three colours.) Gives you much better colour quality and sharper image - given the lower megapixel count - due to the lack of need for filters to put the colour back, and the advantage of lower memory consumption and faster processing time in software, but somewhat lower luminance resolution.
Because the sensor's a few years old, yes it is time it got an update and Engadget are right to use the term 'old' (even if they're wrong with the rest). Unfortunately the entire rest of the industry ignored this sensor; sales of Sigma DP-x have to be orders of magnitude behind sales of any sensors used within Canon/Nikon/Sony/etc products. I guess this translates into less R+D budget for improvements - which is a shame.
Now that we are approaching resolution limits (diffraction, etc) perhaps it will soon be the case that full-colour sensors - either with this layered technology, or with an approach that groups 4 RGBG subpixels of a standard sensor behind a single microlens* (do that right now with an 19+ MP sensor and you're at higher resolution than Foveon with much much much better noise performance) - will become standard in other cameras. I really hope so because this definitely seems like a good approach for the future.
* This is just my speculation - this approach might not work in the simple manner I described. However there must surely be some workable approach other than the one Foveon patented.
@(Unverified) 14mp is not a lie. When they say there are 14,000,000 pixels. There are! 1/3 of them is green,1/3 is blue and 1/3 is red. In the exact same manner that a 14mp bayer is (only different color proportions).
The 14mp is AS MUCH of a lie as it is on ALL the current bayer sensors. The only reason Foveon is lieing is because Bayer pattern manfucturers have been lieing for years (and getting away with it).
There are pros/cons to both sensors. Foveon is definitely more theoretically pure - there's 3 colors for every pixel, just copy them to the file from the buffer. Bayer pattern requires a lot of processing (not because there's more data, but because all of the data has to interpolated, to extend the color data to the pixels that actually have no sensors of that color). Foveon sensor of the same rating (say a 15mp) will have high resolution of the same color image (because each color has 5mp), and Bayer will give higher resolution of a black and white image (7.5mp for green and 3.75mp for blue and 3.75mp for red). It's actually sad that most people don't know how much processing the bayer pattern cameras HAVE TO DO. That's why the bayer pattern cameras always advertise the processing (ie, Vinus, Digic, etc), because so much of captureing the photo is in the processing of the bayer pattern. There's no way around it, if you turn it off, you're stuck with someone that has to be rated as a 3.75mp (for a currently rated"15mp" sensor), and lose all the benefits of the bayer sensor to begin with.
There's no such thing as a 19mp full color pixel bayer, because by definition it would be a 60mp bayer, and there would not be a reason to put a "micro lens" in front of it (that would defeat the purpose of collecting individual pixels).
The phone has 256MB of RAM and a 1GHz processor, which do the job reasonably well, though the Anna interface will likely leave something to be desired for many smartphone users.
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It's not some "old 14 megapixel DSLR-level CMOS sensor"! The DP cameras come the Foveon sensors with stacked photodiods rather than standard CMOS sensors which are arranged in the Bayer pattern. Shame on you Engadget for your lackluster reporting!
@jakeshdaddy Yes, but ALSO the 14MP thing is a lie; it's really 14/3 MP (4.7), but all of those pixels being full colour. (A standard 14MP camera really has 14MP, but each one is only one of the three colours.) Gives you much better colour quality and sharper image - given the lower megapixel count - due to the lack of need for filters to put the colour back, and the advantage of lower memory consumption and faster processing time in software, but somewhat lower luminance resolution.
Because the sensor's a few years old, yes it is time it got an update and Engadget are right to use the term 'old' (even if they're wrong with the rest). Unfortunately the entire rest of the industry ignored this sensor; sales of Sigma DP-x have to be orders of magnitude behind sales of any sensors used within Canon/Nikon/Sony/etc products. I guess this translates into less R+D budget for improvements - which is a shame.
Now that we are approaching resolution limits (diffraction, etc) perhaps it will soon be the case that full-colour sensors - either with this layered technology, or with an approach that groups 4 RGBG subpixels of a standard sensor behind a single microlens* (do that right now with an 19+ MP sensor and you're at higher resolution than Foveon with much much much better noise performance) - will become standard in other cameras. I really hope so because this definitely seems like a good approach for the future.
* This is just my speculation - this approach might not work in the simple manner I described. However there must surely be some workable approach other than the one Foveon patented.
@(Unverified)
14mp is not a lie. When they say there are 14,000,000 pixels. There are! 1/3 of them is green,1/3 is blue and 1/3 is red. In the exact same manner that a 14mp bayer is (only different color proportions).
The 14mp is AS MUCH of a lie as it is on ALL the current bayer sensors. The only reason Foveon is lieing is because Bayer pattern manfucturers have been lieing for years (and getting away with it).
There are pros/cons to both sensors. Foveon is definitely more theoretically pure - there's 3 colors for every pixel, just copy them to the file from the buffer. Bayer pattern requires a lot of processing (not because there's more data, but because all of the data has to interpolated, to extend the color data to the pixels that actually have no sensors of that color). Foveon sensor of the same rating (say a 15mp) will have high resolution of the same color image (because each color has 5mp), and Bayer will give higher resolution of a black and white image (7.5mp for green and 3.75mp for blue and 3.75mp for red). It's actually sad that most people don't know how much processing the bayer pattern cameras HAVE TO DO. That's why the bayer pattern cameras always advertise the processing (ie, Vinus, Digic, etc), because so much of captureing the photo is in the processing of the bayer pattern. There's no way around it, if you turn it off, you're stuck with someone that has to be rated as a 3.75mp (for a currently rated"15mp" sensor), and lose all the benefits of the bayer sensor to begin with.
There's no such thing as a 19mp full color pixel bayer, because by definition it would be a 60mp bayer, and there would not be a reason to put a "micro lens" in front of it (that would defeat the purpose of collecting individual pixels).