"reins"

Whoops, I see it's still only 3 layers.

The Foveon sensor has its drawbacks. However, in terms of image quality, it is roughly equivalent to a Bayer sensor of the stated number of pixels (14 in this case). You have to remember that 2/3rds of the information in a Bayer-sensor camera is simply made up. Furthermore, because the color pixels of a Bayer sensor are separated in space, the sensor requires an anti-aliasing filter in front of it -- anti-aliasing being, in this case, another way of saying "blurring," i.e., removal of detail. Foveon sensors don't require this. (Well, technically they do, but the Foveon artifacts are much less annoying. With Bayer sensors you get unacceptable color moire if you don't have an antialiasing filter; with Foveon sensors you get a bit of spatial aliasing of fine detail.)

You could in theory take a Foveon image and blow it up to 14 true megapixels using something like PhotoZoom Pro and have an image that matches a 14 megapixel Bayer image for detail.

Foveon's Achilles heel actually has been color, not resolution. The sensor has historically suffered from metamerism, i.e., colors that are distinct to the human eye become a single color in a Foveon image. The sensor has been particularly weak with the cooler end of the spectrum, if I remember correctly. It'll be interesting to see if they've addressed this weakness in the new sensor. If kdo is correct, and they're now using 4 layers rather than 3, they may have done something about the color response.

The ideal digital camera would have two aligned sensors: a monochrome one for detail (luminance) and a Bayer mosaic one from which color (chroma) is derived. I'm surprised no one has done this, frankly, it's such an obvious idea. Alignment between the sensors could be done largely in software.

With regard to the cordless phone base station, Panasonic has a UPS specifically for its phones. Since it backs up the DC power provided by the wall wart, it is much simpler and cheaper than a full AC UPS that has to have an inverter, and provides more runtime per unit of battery output. Saw one at Fry's this past weekend. A real UPS is more flexible, of course, but this is a clever idea.

"Shouldn't they just need the one REAL color setting?" Which "one" REAL color setting would that be? Daylight, or incandescent, or fluorescent?

Price was I think $270 on $280 on the show floor at Macworld. The view throug them is pretty good, all things considered, but fairly low-resolution -- you can easily see the dots.