Monochrome Image Capture

The quality of images captured with a monochrome E-back sensor easily surpasses the quality of images captured with a decaled color sensor.  Bayer pattern filtration imposes fundamental limitations when the lens is sharply focused on a finely detailed, high frequency reflectance. On color captures with patterned color decals (e.g., Bayer pattern), fine detail on the order of one pixel in size at the focal plane will give rise to image artifacts due to color aliasing. Digital processing can reduce such errors, often to acceptable levels for color images. But there are numerous imaging situations (such as repeating patterns with a frequency at the focal plane close to the pixel pitch) which produce luminance moire that cannot be eliminated without considerable effort, and then, only at the expense of image quality.

Alias-induced errors can only be fully eliminated by employing an optical low pass filter such as is normally integrated into dSLR's. These filters work by diffusing and obscuring the sharply focused fine details. After the low-pass anti-alias diffusion, sharp edges turn into soft edges, commonly smearing color across pixel boundaries. The optical low pass filter is equally effective at reducing image sharpness as it is at reducing aliasing errors.