Untitled, Belgrade, March 2007The post I wrote on my digicam got me thinking as to a different kind of camera that a manufacturer might consider making: the B&W digicam.
What would it look like? Something simple no need for a slew of fancy controls. Wide lens (28mm-e or there abouts) at the wide end. With a luminance-only sensor, more light would get to the pixels and you'd get more detail out of those there, so I reckon 5Mp would do it. ISO performance would be good (maybe 1-1.5 stops better than today) due to the 3 times light getting to the sensor elements. No need for fancy anti-IR screening (go read some stuff on the Leica M8 if you want to know about that).
Simple exposure compensation. Bit of noise is OK - easy to fix after the fact, and loads shot Tri-X in the past, so gritty B&W is a defined style.
Surely something that simple would be cheap and yet give good photos. If my Samsung had no colour info from the off, it would be a ten times better camera. For $100-200 you couldn't go wrong. Of course it wouldn't be for everyone, but at that price and with decent output, serious photogs would flock to it (IMO).
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I would agree with you about serious photographers flocking to it, but I think that they, the manufacturers, would need a much broader market to cover development costs.
ReplyDeleteAs for the IR, I still think that since image sensors are so sensitive to IR that you'd need an IR filter/screen for the sensor. I'd love to have such a camera.