A smart idea from Ming Thein: Create sensors with irregular shaped pixels

I still shoot film (with the [shoplink 60642 ebay]Mamiya 7[/shoplink]) and I always wondered if it would be possible to get that “natural” and “irregular” film look on digital cameras. Ming Thein has an idea about that:

Here we come to the crux of the matter: I think the limitation of digital lies in the geometry and shape of the photosites, not the number or density. If we had irregular pixels (which could be a repeating pattern over a much larger area) the sensors would be able to better match the irregular nature of the subject (which in turn forms an irregular input signal). The pixels could be each the same area to avoid gain problems, and they could be fairly large in order to maintain good noise, color and dynamic range characteristics. Fuji tried to change the sensor with diagonal arrays and small-large arrays, but they were still fundamentally too regular – resulting in even worse strange artefacts because we were now trying to output an image with an underlying 45 degree structure onto a 90 degree orthogonal output medium. The files printed well, however, because of the dithering process during print explained previously.

If that would really work I hope Panasonic-Olympus will do such a sensor one day!