Hi Steve,
As you know, I have great respect for your writing.
The view I take on this is that Phase One claims they have a new revolutionary colour filter arrangement. It is a very tall statement, by any means, and anyone interested in colour science would be curious about that. Let's check the information:
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So you have a lady in pink shot in artifical light at dusk illustrating the advance made. So you press the learn more button.
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And you are rewarded by some more images, that say little about the great advance made. There is some text describing the new sensor, the page ends with an "explore the science" button.
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So this is the science, non overlapping spectral curves. Problem is that it would not work, at least it would not work with spectral colours. Yellow, for instance would excite both red and green channel. But, with non overlapping filters a yellow colour would either show up as red or as green. Most of the yellows we see are mixes of colours, of course.
That illustration has raised a small discussion on the "Photographic Science and Technology" sub forum, see here:
https://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/60114036
Just to say, CFA design does matter. This was written a few years ago on Fred Miranda forums by "The Suede". The Suede is known as one of the giants in the colour industry.
"The color rendering of say a H4D or a P65+ is close to impossible to mimic with certain smaller cameras, Canon uses a totally different filter strategy, and so does Oly. It EXTREMELY hard to get the same effect in manual PP work, and actually impossible to do it fully automated even with the best camera color profiles.
Some of the main parts that are hard to mimic is the way noise and luma detail contrast relate to the underlying color. In a Canon, that has very low green-orange separation in raw, luma detail and noise on green, orange and red colors will behave a certain way. They tend to get "flat", and hue tends to get rather flat too. Trying to increase color separation in the camera profile increases chroma noise in the file, and it also has negative effects on luma - giving lots of false detail.
But, Canon did this for a reason - this CFA strategy gets the smallest possible penalty for shooting in fluorescent and stadium lights, something you actually do in quite a lot of sports, as a reporter, or indeed as a private user shooting your kids with the kit lens. And they get very even and flat skin tones, stuff like red rashes and so on are covered up automatically by the lowered hue resolution.
Medium format, Leica, Kodak - they all err on the "other side" of that fence. They're too well resolving in orange, and this isn't good either. The camera then gets extremely "sensitive" to the lighting conditions. Try shooting informal portraits with a P45+ in an office space with normal office lighting fixtures, without flash or natural light - the results are horrific. People look like they're in second stage corpse decomposition no matter what PP or camera profile you use.
Nikon does some stuff right, but they have an over-sensitivity to yellow, and that makes the balance very hard to nail down in people photography. But they're (IMO) the best landscape cameras, since no other camera can touch them for green hue resolution. They have extreme resolution in green-yellow, something you can see when shooting large landscapes - every bush and tree can be identified by the amount of chlorofyll-A vs Chlorofyll-B mix the plant uses. The camera can easily pick out extremely small hue differences between two very similar greens standing next to each other.
The best color "balance" for general usage that I've ever seen is actually the older Sony cameras (like the 850/900). They had their weaknesses, but they were better balanced than anything I've seen since - not counting the 15k€ specialist SML-filtered cameras we've used next to the hyperspectrals when doing art and craft history, but they're special cases."
http://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/1234124/2&year=2013#11744473
This posting is also quite interesting:
http://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/1234124/2&year=2013#11744630
What is obvious from theSuede's writing is that thrichromatic colour rendition is a compromise. The Bayer pattern actually allows for two different greens, Sony has done that on a bridge camera long. That technology may have had some benefits, but was probably not well supported by raw converters.
I don't expect a camera vendor to share their technology in scientific papers, although that is quite feasible once a patent has been acquired. But, I would expect more and better information when a vendor claims new and revolutionary technology.
Best regards
Erik