Sigma SD1 Review

By Michael Reichmann, with the assistance of Nick Devlinand the participation of Laurence Matson 
TheSigma SD1is that company's long-awaited APS-C sized camera using a Foveon X3 sensor. The camera was first shown at Photokina in late 2010 and started to ship in June, 2011. Its launch created something of a furor because the company had telegraphed that it would come in at under $2,000, yet when launched the list price was USD $9,700. This quickly slipped to a street price of $6,899, but still much more than anyone had expected or wanted it to cost. I wrote about this at the time in an essay titledRationalizing The Irrational. I'll have more to say about the camera's pricing later in this report.
The Foveon sensor story is a long and complex one, and if you want backgroundthis Wikipedia articleis the best place to start. Briefly though, its claimed advantage is that instead of placing red, blue, and green filters over adjacent pixels using aBayer Matrix colour filter array, ...