Comment Re:True black and white sensor. (Score 1) 167
Today, bayer matrix and AA filters are glued on the chip in the manufacturing process, and it's impossible to get rid of it afterwards.
Not that it really makes a huge difference, but while the Bayer matrix is fabricated as part of the sensor chip, the AA filter is not.
Removing the color filters would not really affect the requirement for AA filtering either. And, just FWIW, there have been a few cameras built with Bayer filters, but not (physical) AA filters (e.g. the Kodak Pro dSLRs).
It would appear that in most cases, the AA filter doesn't really have much affect on final sharpness anyway. Just for example, if you read through a description of a test procedure, you quickly realize that very few pictures approach the maximum sharpness of which a current camera/lens combo is capable.
Finally, I'd note that if you really don't want a Bayer-pattern sensor, you can get a Fuji camera. They use a type of sensor originally developed by Foveon (which Fuji since bought out) that has individual sensor elements "stacked", to there's a red, green, and blue element at each pixel location. While Fuji's cameras are perfectly good and work quite nicely in general, they're not really a whole lot better than most others (if anything, they seem to lag a bit behind the field in general). At least when you look at a JPEG, however, those extra sensor elements aren't doing a whole lot of good -- a JPEG sub-samples the chrominance channels, so they have half the resolution of the luminance channel anyway. This isn't quite identical to a Bayer pattern, with twice the density of green sensors as red or blue, but it works out pretty close.