Panasonic new sensor technology

Panasonic has revealed they are developing a new type of sensor, in which a ‘micro color splitter’ is used to redirect light of a certain color to a particular pixel. The advantage over the Bayer sensor that is used in almost all digital cameras today would be that no light is lost by filtering, so the sensor would gain about one stop of sensitivity. The technology looks promising and one can easily imagine that a sensor like this would indeed have a higher sensitivity, but I do wonder what the effect of this ‘light scatter’ technique would have on the resolution of such a sensor. Because a ray of light that is destined for one pixel is split over three pixels, wouldn’t the resolution suffer as a result? Only time will tell if this technology will ever be used in a camera and if indeed a sensor like this would have a lower resolution than a Bayer sensor with the same pixel count, but it’s exiting to see that sensor technology is still a work in progress.