Digital Home Thoughts: Sigma Announces SD1 DSLR with Foveon Sensor

Right, does anyone still remember Foveon? The group (now bought over by Sigma) came up with the X3 sensor, which mimicked film by having an individual layer for each colour channel, thereby doing away with the Bayer filter which needed interpolation to generate a full colour image. Long story short, the X3 sensor promised better resolution. The problem was that no one other than Sigma took up the sensor seriously, and the first few cameras were terribly flawed; high ISO was a problem, and red channel sensitivity was an issue (the red channel is the last layer). Top it off the sensors had less pixel output compared to the ever-increasing densities of Bayer sensors, which diminished Foveon's advantage (resorting to the silly PR stunt of tripling the megapixel count in the advertising).

Hopefully the SD1 resolves all that; the camera features a 15 megapixel sensor (45 if you use Foveon's reckoning) and the sensor itself is now a proper APS-C size. Of course, the final deal breaker is this: It's still based on a Sigma camera, which, in best of times, is a poor Canon copy, and restricting oneself to just Sigma lenses is not an appealing limitation, even though Sigma has tried to update the camera with modern features like an 11 point AF system and a 3" VGA LCD. So like many photographers, I'll just sit on the sidelines and wish Foveon luck. No word on pricing and availability.