Image Sharpness

I gotta give it to Sigma, to be the first to incorporate the Foveon X3 sensor (www.foveon.com) in their DSLR. I am not too fond of Sigma's cameras themselves; there are already 5 firmware updates to the Sigma's latest SD14 since its debut in late fall of 2006. That only shows how buggy the camera is and it has sure enough not gone through enough professional hands to be a serious contender to the Nikon and Canon counterparts. However, reading the specs of the Foveon X3 sensor, I can imagine it will take only a few more years of experience until Sigma can produce a camera of the same or higher caliber than the current cream of the crop.

The latest Foveon sensor packs 14.1 megapixels in a 24.9mm footprint. The 14.1 megapixels is made up of three layers of 2688x1792 sensor sites (so maybe it would be more correct to say it has only 4.6 megapixels). Each sensor site has 3 pixel sensors stacked on top of each other. Each pixel sensor can capture a distinct portion of the RGB spectrum so each sensor site is able to reproduce fairly accurately the RGB colour as seen by that site. Thus, there is no interpolation of colours as performed in sensors used by every other digital cameras.

What it means is, an image captured by the Foveon X3 sensor is extremely sharp, sharp across the whole sensor at every pixel location. I can hardly wait to see advancement in this technology. They just need to pack more and more sensor sites and the Foveon X3 will dominate the sensor market. I would not be surprised to see Nikon using this technology in the near future. I believe Nikon made a D70f that used the Foveon sensor but the technology was still premature at the time.