What would the FFF have to do in order to be competative?

Warning: Severely cutting context since - despite rumors - I don't have opinions on everything.

abera wrote:

FWIW, I don't generally care at all if the colors of my photos are accurate or not. As long as they are pleasing to me is what counts.

Agree.

Anyhow, why auto WB? This implies also using the cameras JPG engine. Both however mean that this is not more about image sensor but about system under certain specific conditions.

Agree, and Foveon very is picky about conditions. I happen to shoot under those conditions most of the time, though.

If you want to compare sensors, you need to shoot in raw. And you don't really process the results, but measure the results.

An FFF doesn't need to win every measurement competition to sell. It needs to convice people like you and me, who value pleasing rendering over theoretical accuracy.

Of course that has more to do with firmware than sensor capabilities, I'm sure.

Yup. It has very little to do with the sensor as what the camera JPG engine produces is largerly a function of marketing, "brand colors" within the performance envelope and engineering limitations.

And this is where it gets interesting: The engineering limitations of the Bayer sensors used in the Sigma fp and fp L cameras clearly don't allow Sigma to replicate the rendering of their Foveon cameras when the latter are used within their sweet spot.

Lately I've heard a lot about "color science" (not that I think a camera's in-camera processing is all that important), and Fuji seems to be getting talked up a lot lately. Maybe Sigma will fing itself in a similar position at some point.

Most people who talk about "color science" don't have a clue what it actually is. I'm certainly not an expert on the issue, but when people talk about for example "Fuji colors" they don't talk about color accuracy, at least not in the way which would have any scientific meaning. Instead it's about how some people like colors of Fuji.

This of course is a bit weird to me since Fuji, like other cameras, offers multiple different color interepretions of the data the sensor has captured.

And it's that interpretation that sells Fuji cameras, despite the fact they they have worse DR than full frame competitors.

2) Camera provides photographers with medium format image detail in a camera that weighs half as much, and has a huge selection of affordable lenses available.

Assuming Quattro pixel pitch - tough to go smaller due to technical reason like low SNR in lower layers - it would have 46MP. Normal CFA sensors capture capture - at least from mathematical point of view - just about all luminance information (which is what is relevant for resolution).

This is objectively wrong unless the CFA in question also has very low color separation. You can't have it both ways.

3) Foveon sensor advantage means that even with the sharpest lenses and the sharpest aperture setting, there is no color moire to deal with.

Quattro subsamples two layers, so I wouldn't call it immune to moiré,

There might be a theoretical possibility for color moiré, but it's simply not there in real life - which I definitely can't say about my fp.