Jamie LeJeune wrote: The default look of a camera is just a set of manufacturer choices about color processing that can be totally changed in post, not some inherent quality of the sensor itself.
I'm not sure I'd agree with that.
For starters there's a LOT that can be customised in the sensor package itself. You can see this from the fact that some sensor families get used in a lot of different brand cameras and yet yield different results.
Not only that but other customisations like the CFA itself, which is literally coloured filters. These can be changed, altered, having different values. This will GREATLY affect the end result. Many people that claim to LOVE the CCD Look, probably really just love the Kodak specified CFA that was on a lot of those CCD sensors used in earlier cinema cameras.
Then there's sensors like the dual gain sensor of the BMD camera. That is two seperate images that have to be combined. Those images have overlapping sensitivity so you don't just mush them together and hope for the best. They spend a lot of time finessing the way the images are sandwiched together so you the end user can't SEE those transitions in the image from high going to low gain.
One of the reasons they designed their own sensor was that I know that the dual gain sensors in particular took a HUGE amount of time to dial in for this very reason. Every new iteration they'd have to start again and it takes a lot of time and resources.
JB