I was watching a video this week and I noticed a classic example of a Moiré pattern. This is interesting as modern camera generally have such good filters, it’s not particularly common anymore.
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The effect is caused by two overlaying lines colliding with each other, a single line example would be like a barber shop sign where the lines move upwards. The line’s aren’t actually going up but your perception of them is. When two lines clash they create a Moire Pattern. This is quite uncommon to see these days as most modern broadcast equipment has a Anti-Moire filter placed in-front on the imaging sensor. Its a fancy name for a blurry filter.
Using a anti Moire filter does cause a rather obvious problem. It reduces the overall image sharpness, to blur together the clashing lines, therefore removing the unwanted effect. In the case of a camera the TWO sets of lines that are clashing are caused by the lines on the shirt and the pixel alignment on the chip called a Beyer Pattern, later corrected by the filter.
A particular camera manufacturer figured that there must be a better solution to just blurring the pixels together. Well… Fuji figured out that if you randomise the pixel pattern, it would eliminate the Moire effect. And what clever peeps they are. It totally worked. They created a X-Trans sensor different to the traditional Beyer pattern sensor. This had many advantages, one of which was a much sharper final image, as nothing is being blurred. The second was a much greater light throughput, as adding filters reduces the amount of stops of light. By removing the filter it allowed the camera to produce better cleaner images in low light.
Well… You’ve got to admit that Fuji did something really cool!
Yours, The Enginer’d