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Kodak Unveils Brighter CMOS Color Filters
brownsteve writes "Eastman Kodak Co. has unveiled what it says are 'next-generation color filter patterns' designed to more than double the light sensitivity of CMOS or CCD image sensors used in camera phones or digital still cameras. The new color filter system is a departure from the widely used standard Bayer pattern — an arrangement of red, green and blue pixels — also created by Kodak. While building on the Bayer pattern, the new technology adds a 'fourth pixel, which has no pigment on top,' said Michael DeLuca, market segment manager responsible for image sensor solutions at Eastman Kodak. Such 'transparent' pixels — sensitive to all visible wavelengths — are designed to absorb light. DeLuca claimed the invention is 'the next milestone' in digital photography, likening its significance to ISO 400 color film introduced in the mid-1980's."
I'm not sure you would lose "color resolution" at all. The current RGB scheme combines color and luminosity. Under the new scheme, those could be separated, much the way LAB color space works. Potentially, this could give you a greater dynamic range, which would address the biggest weakness of current digital cameras. Of course, the proof will be in the execution. If it yields more noise in the process, then it won't be worth a damn. We'll see.
You don't really lose a quarter of your color resolution... you lose half the resolution in a specific wavelength, the one normally corresponding to green (though how this is mapped to RG or GB (rarely purely G) is up to the demosaicing algorithm. On the up side, you gain light sensitivity by a factor more than two; assume the filters were perfect and light only existed in the wavelengths they let through. Then any single filtered cell only receives 33% of the stimulans. An unfiltered cell would get the full 100%.
This additional intensity resolution is, of course, only at a quarter of that of the resolution a full bayer... but nobody ever said you had to discard the intensity measured by the red/green/blue filtered bits; in fact, you can't, or you can't very well determine color at all.
It's actually a pretty obvious setup (it has likenings to the RGBe storage format.. though that has much larger range, it also mostly separates color (RGB) and intensity (exponent)) - can't wait to see it patented - and makes me wonder why the Bayer pattern was the choice in the first place. I certainly know why they picked green as the go-to channel (human visual sensitivity, blabla), and why the there have to be groups of 4 in the first place (cells are square/rectangular.. design a triangular sensor cell, somebody - quick! gimme that hexagonal sensor).. but why just now Kodak pops this up..
CMYK filters were actually tried:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CYGM_filter
They don't actually provide any practical benefit over RGB in terms of noise, if your final output is meant to be RGB, due to the mathematics of the color space transformation. And your final output is generally RGB, for digital photography; even if you print, the intermediate formats are generally RGB, and cheap consumer printers take input in RGB, not CMYK.
It's done on TV all the time and nobody complains (chrominance is separated from luminance and often transmitted at much lower resolution). As has been pointed out below, your eyes are made up of rods (which see black and white) and cones (which see color), and only a fraction of those cones are devoted to each individual red, green, or blue spectrum. So your color resolution is already significantly lower than your luminance resolution. You can even see photos demonstrating this with a 9x decrease in color resolution (3x in each linear direction). You're most sensitive to green, which is why the Bayer sensors commonly used in digital cameras divide each 4 pixels into GRGB.