Leica’s incredible Monochrom camera costs $8,000, and shoots only B&W images. That is of course an absurd price, but it does bring amazing light sensitivity and detail thanks to the fact that there are no color filters blocking light from the sensor, and that all three dots from each pixel are dedicated to grabbing luminance data.
New Zealander Raymond Collecutt clearly liked the look of a dedicated monochrome sensor, but didn’t like the price. So he did what anyone would do—he sacrificed one of his two Canon EOS 1000Ds to the cause, and scraped off the color micro lenses on top of the sensor.
Raymond popped off the glass that protects the front of the sensor (and which might just be the anti-aliasing filter which also decreases sharpness) and then took to the sensor’s bare surface with a Dremel. After some patient polishing, he was left with this result:
The sides have been left alone so as not to damage the circuitry at the sensor’s edges, which is the kind of wiring you can’t fix no matter how good you are with a soldering iron.
But the results of this double removal (AA filter and microlenses) can be (very) clearly seen at the top of the post. I do wonder, though, if software would also need to be tweaked to take advantage of the extra light and detail. After all, if you load the RAW file into Lightroom or Aperture, it’s still going to try to de-Bayer what it thinks is a color image.
Still, what stones this guy has. I get nervous just cleaning my lenses, let alone doing something like this.
Source: Stargazers Lounge
Via: Petapixel
