the bayer pattern is one of those things that makes me irrationally angry, in the true sense, based on my ignorance of the subject

what's so special about green? oh so just because our eyes are more sensitive to green we should dedicate double the area to green in camera sensors? i mean, probably yes. but still. (⩺_⩹)

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MyOutfitIsVague 21 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Green is in the center of the visible spectrum of light (notice the G in the middle of ROYGBIV), so evolution should theoretically optimize for green light absorption. An interesting article on why plants typically reflect that wavelength and absorb the others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_Earth_hypothesis

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bmitc 19 hours ago | parent [-]

Green is the highest energy light emitted by our sun, from any part of the entire light spectrum, which is why green appears in the middle of the visible spectrum. The visible spectrum basically exists because we "grew up" with a sun that blasts that frequency range more than any other part of the light spectrum.

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imoverclocked 19 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I have to wonder what our planet would look like if the spectrum shifts over time. Would plants also shift their reflected light? Would eyes subtly change across species? Of course, there would probably be larger issues at play around having a survivable environment … but still, fun to ponder.

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cycomanic 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That comment does not make sense. Do you mean the sun emits it's peak intensity at green (I don't believe that is true either, but at least it would make a physically sensical statement). To clarify why the statement does not make sense, the energy of light is directly proportional to its frequency so saying that green is the highest energy light the sun emits is saying the sun does not emit any light at frequency higher than green, i.e. no blue light no UV... That's obviously not true.

	▲	antonvs 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Do you mean the sun emits its peak intensity at green That's presumably what they mean. It's more or less true, except the color in question is at the green / yellow transition. See e.g. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/courses-images-archive-re...

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milleramp 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Several reasons, -Silicon efficiency (QE) peaks in the green -Green spectral response curve is close to the luminance curve humans see, like you said. -Twice the pixels to increase the effective resolution in the green/luminance channel, color channels in YUV contribute almost no details.

Why is YUV or other luminance-chrominance color spaces important for a RGB input? Because many processing steps and encoders, work in YUV colorspaces. This wasn't really covered in the article.

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shiandow 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You think that's bad? Imagine finding out that all video still encodes colour at half resolution simply because that is how analog tv worked.

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seba_dos1 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I don't think that's correct. It's not "all video" - you can easily encode video without chroma subsampling - and it's not because this is how analog TV worked, but rather for the same reason why analog TV worked this way, which is the fact that it lets you encode significantly less data with barely noticeable quality loss. JPEGs do the same thing.

	▲	shiandow 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's a very crude method, with modern codecs I would be very surprised if you didn't get a better image just encoding the chroma at a lower bitrate.

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heckelson 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Isn't it the other way round? We did and still do chroma subsampling _because_ we don't see that much of a difference?

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Renaud 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Not sure why it would invoke such strong sentiments but if you don’t like the bayer filter, know that some true monochrome cameras don’t use it and make every sensor pixel available to the final image.

For instance, the Leica M series have specific monochrome versions with huge resolutions and better monochrome rendering.

You can also modify some cameras and remove the filter, but the results usually need processing. A side effect is that the now exposed sensor is more sensitive to both ends of the spectrum.

	▲	NetMageSCW 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Not to mention that there are non-Bayer cameras that vary from the Sigma Foveon and Quattro sensors that use stacked sensors to filter out color entirely differently to the Fuji EXR and X-Trans sensors.

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japanuspus 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If the Bayer pattern makes you angry, I imagine it would really piss you off to realize that the whole concept encoding an experienced color by a finite number of component colors is fundamentally species-specific and tied to the details of our specific color sensors.

To truly record an appearance without reference to the sensory system of our species, you would need to encode the full electromagnetic spectrum from each point. Even then, you would still need to decide on a cutoff for the spectrum.

...and hope that nobody ever told you about coherence phenomena.