"mike regish" writes:

What's with the 3.1 megapixel/6 megapixel effective stuff?

What is it. 3.1 or 6?

It's 3.1.

This is something Fuji keeps screwing up on, and it annoys the heck
outa me.

Here follows more photo-neepery than most people probably care
about....

The Fuji "super-CCD" is a good design. It uses octagonal cells (yes,
8-sided, not 6-sided, and not 4-sided), and they're arranged in more
of a diamond grid (definitely not in a simple rectangular array).
This lets more of each cell be the actual light-sensitive part, which
increases sensitivity and lowers noise. Practical trials of Fuji
cameras show definite improvements in noise levels and a small
increase in resolution compared to a normal, rectangular, array of the
same number of pixels (see reports at http://dpreview.com, a very
good site for digital camera info). The reports on the Fuji S2 Pro
are the ones I'm most familiar with, since that's the camera I was
studying (and decided in the end to buy).

Now, to get an actual rectangular array of pixels out of this, some
processing is needed. The way Fuji does it involves resampling the
funny array up to a rectangular grid of twice as many pixels.

Then some marketing dweeb decided to try to market those cameras as
actually having that many pixels. This, of course, caused lots of
people to go off like rockets!

On my Fuji S2, except when I need raw mode, the most useful mode is to
have it store a 3kx2k (i.e. 6MP) jpeg. So the data path is from 6
million sensors (each reading only *one* of red, green, and blue --
standard Bayer pattern sensor) to 12 million RGB pixels down to 6
million RGB pixels, and then jpeg compression. Luckily the S2 has
enough processing power to handle it (it shoots very slightly *faster*
than the Nikon D100, the closest model for comparison).
--
David Dyer-Bennet, , www.dd-b.net/dd-b/
RKBA: noguns-nomoney.com www.dd-b.net/carry/
Photos: dd-b.lighthunters.net Snapshots: www.dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/
Dragaera/Steven Brust: dragaera.info/