The new FFF has some stiff competition

danski0224 wrote:

Yes, lens corner performance.

This was a bad issue with the SD1 Merrill, especially apparent with non-Sigma adapted lenses. The ray angle at the corners played havoc with the stacked Foveon architecture in that sensor.

Nowadays, with the L mount consortium, users can swap lenses from other brands and of course adapt Leica M mount lenses. The consensus seems to be that Leica M lenses do worse in the corners than native L mount lenses, because of ray angle, even though at this point all the L mount sensors are Bayer.

This issue is going to be much worse with full-frame short-flange mirrorless systems such as the L mount, compared to the long flange SA mount. And the APS-C Merrill sensor did poorly even with the long flange mount.

This alone could kill the idea of a full frame Foveon.

Note that the sd Quattro did much better in this area. It still displayed unwelcome coloration across the frame but the magnitude of the coloration was small. I was able to look the other way...

Older bodies such as the SD15 did much better, but the sensors were smaller than APS-C by a small amount, and the pixel pitch was coarser, and the pixels themselves were more resistant to the shadowing color cast that dominated Merrill images when adapted lenses were tried.

At least, that's been my experience.

PS: It's interesting that the fp L can be manually set up to correct this sort of thing. So it must be a factor with high resolution Bayer sensors also. I haven't found it necessary to use this feature so far. I'm using several completely manual L-mount lenses, and an adapted Leica M mount lens.