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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."
Kodak has rediscovered what evolution found millions of years ago -- design a dual system such as the rods and cones of the biological eye. The average human eye has about 120 million sensitive, panchromatic rods and only 6 or 7 million color-sensitive cones (many in the central fovea). The brain merges the limited amounts of color information with the larger volume of B/W image data to paint color into the image that we think we see.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
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.