I'll have to review how the colour filter works, but if they could only produce a $2k 12k pocket
Anyway, it is my gap theory, any gap in image acquisition has to be made up for, and that's often by calculation, but calculation can still leave deficencies. So, to put it simply, it is like saying their was a civil war and that the civil war finished, it doesn't tell you much about what happened in between. If you sort of average out what it looked like by how society looked before and after, you are not going get good results normally too much. With Bayer, if you just average the missing colour by the surrounding matching primary colour pixels, sometimes it's going be that bad, other times is probably not going be as bad. Now, if you presume a bit of what war looks like, you ussually get a bit more accurate, like in the Bayer situation, sometimes that will help a lot, other times that won't help so much. So, what you do is go to historical records and archeology, and try to build a big and small picture of what happened, to get a fair idea of the big picture and details of everyday life. With Bayer this means you look at everything surrounding to try to get the detail up, often this would help, but the way it's done you are looking at some deficencies, and the way Bayer sensors compensates, with olpf, you get more deficency on the visible colour too, which can be used to try to pry into the missing neighbouring colour. So, hybrid complementary/primary layered colour filtering sensors, like Foveon X3, produce some nicer results in comparison. But saying half the pixels of this one are clear, and there is only one of each 12k primary pixel for each 4k pixel, gets me worried, because there are lots of gaps. Kodak developed the rgbw alternative to Bayer years ago for consumer cameras, to get better low light etc. I haven't seen that widely adopted or replacing Bayer, which indicates to me the question, why? So, is this going be close to flawless at 8k+, or are there going be issues on patterns/details etc? A clear pixel contains all the colour, but we don't know how much of each. In Bayer, you knew one colour for each pixel. So, would 24k render 4k pixels better, and what does that say about 8k?
The foveon X3 should be just about, or, out of patent. It would have been great to see something like that with modern tech to get better low noise, low light and dynamic range on it compared to old foveon sensor tech. A number of technologies will be dropping out of patent, and licensable cheap before hand. So, such a sensor might be releasable next year or two, with minimised licensing. Such would blow things away, and BM could always arrange a test slither on production wafers to test out new pixel ideas. I hope this one is great, it they could make the next one like the X3 in a couple of years. A 4k micro with something like that, makes 8k less desirable. But, it's likely already done and dusted, as they say over here. But, the X3 like clone wars are coming I think.