Last Updated on 04/18/2018 by Mark Beckenbach
In some circles of photography, film is really the only option for attaining maximum sharpness from a lens–and those circles may attribute the problem to a Bayer Filter. Look at it this way: the Leica Monochrom offers such incredibly sharp photos because of the lack of a Bayer filter. So that has to be the case, right? Well, not really.
Drew Altdoerffer is the Phase One, Product Manager & Market Specialist and he told us this:
“The Bayer filter itself does NOT make the image less sharp. The Bayer filter is simply a way to designate a color filtration for each individual pixel. If the image were rendered without the interpolation of this color information, it would be just as sharp as a camera/sensor without this filter. However in that case you would not have accurate colors. So it is technically the interpolation of what the Bayer filter captures, creating the final colors, which makes the image appear âless sharpâ.
This, in contrast, is why an Achromatic (not Monochromatic) sensor is so much sharper. There is no interpolation and therefore there is no âlossâ of sharpness. Each and every pixel records a direct luminance value and this value is represented in the image with minimal change. When a color back, using a Bayer Filter, goes through the interpolation process to âevaluateâ the color of an individual picture, it has to sacrifice some of the accuracy to achieve this measure. This is where any âlossâ in sharpness is perceived, as the color value represented in the final image is an interpreted value of the pixels, based on the Bayer pattern and how that pattern is interpolated.”
Of course, you can also always find ways to trick the camera and the eye into thinking a photo is sharper than it really is. One common method is to make the blacks deeper–this works well when looking at an image as a whole. Another trick is to simply just use a flash–as the flash duration will add extra sharpness and specular highlights to make the image sharper overall.
