Bayer Patterns Suck

the bad news: Every digital camera (save one) and every digital video camera (under $100,000) uses what's called a Bayer pattern for it's CMOS or CCD sensor.

Sigma's SD14 is the digicam that doesn't, and high end HD/digi-film cameras such as the Sony F23, Thomson Viper, and Panavision Genesis, which are all out of your price range so forget about it.

but anyway, what is a bayer pattern and why should anyone care?

Because, in effect, every camera company is lying to you with your megapixel ratings. Your 14 megapixel camera is actually giving you something that's up-scaled by a factor of three, give or take.

let's take the RED camera, everyone's favorite boner-maker. RED is a 4k camera. This means that each horizontal line of an image that it makes is 4096 dots or long. Now, in a digital image, each dot, much like each dot on a TV, is made up of Red, Green and Blue. The whole issue comes about because in the case of digital camera sensors, each dot is not Red, Green and Blue.

Each dot is Red, Green, OR Blue. In a bayer pattern, the first line goes
G, B, G, B.....
and the second line goes
R, G, R, G........

then there's software on your camera that takes that upper quadrant of one Red, one Blue and Two green and it mashes it together to make four RGB dots.

That is complete fucking bullshit, and I'm pissed.