Eyeing the Camera: Into the Next Century

In the two centuries of photography, there has been a wealth of invention and innovation aimed at capturing a realistic and pleasing full-color two-dimensional representation of a scene. In this paper, we look back at the historical milestones of color photography and bring into focus a fascinating parallelism between the evolution of chemical based color imaging starting over a century ago, and the evolution of electronic photography which continues today. The second part of our paper is dedicated to a technical discussion of the new Foveon X3 multi-layer color image sensor; what could be descried as a new more advanced species of camera sensor technology. The X3 technology is compared to other competing sensor technologies; we compare spectral sensitivities using one of many possible figures of merit. Finally we show and describe how, like the human visual system, the Foveon X3 sensor has an inherent luminance-chrominance behavior which results in higher image quality using fewer image pixels.