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A comment on Pentax K-3 III Monochrome: A DSLR Just for B&W Photo Lovers. Parent comment

Re:Pentax K-3 III Monochrome: A DSLR Just for B&W Photo Lovers by Hooray_Darakian on Tuesday September 05, 2023 @11:49AM (#37393391)
Not really. A color sensor has a filter in front of it (usually a bayer filter) which lets each pixel capture one of the R, G, or B colors. The final image is [demosaiced](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demosaicing) and has a drop in sharpness as a result.

Pentax seems to be omitting the color filter on the sensor rather than just squashing the read out to greyscale so this sensor should be sharper than a similar color sensor.

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Re:Pentax K-3 III Monochrome: A DSLR Just for B&W Photo Lovers by NegativeK on Tuesday September 05, 2023 @12:25PM (#37394032)
I don't think that's a disagreement with their point.

Most people aren't limited by sharpness in sensor with a color filter, so the loss of the choice of mapping to greyscale is more limiting. That's the tradeoff GP comment is referencing.

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Re:Pentax K-3 III Monochrome: A DSLR Just for B&W Photo Lovers by Hooray_Darakian on Tuesday September 05, 2023 @12:33PM (#37394202)
> A colour sensor captures more information

Was the part I was keying in on. A filter will reject more light and in a sense captures less information. I 100% agree that most people are not limited in sharpness, but I wanted to share why someone might care about a sensor like this

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