Sigma DP2 Merrill

The color photographs in this section come from a Sigma DP2 Merrill, a small, stubborn camera from 2012 that almost nobody bought and a devoted few never put down. Written DP2M for short, it carries the Foveon X3 Merrill sensor — and the Foveon is the reason this camera is on this site.

Nearly every digital camera ever made sees color the same way: a single flat layer of sensors, each covered by a tiny red, green or blue filter in a checkerboard. Each point records one color; the other two are estimates, filled in by software from the neighbors. It works remarkably well. But it is, at bottom, an educated guess.

Color film never guessed. A frame of film is a sandwich — three light-sensitive layers stacked on top of one another, one for blue, one for green, one for red. Light sinks through the stack and every layer records its share. Full color, measured at every point.

The Foveon is the only sensor ever built the same way. Three layers of silicon, stacked. Blue light is absorbed near the surface, green deeper, red deeper still — the physics of silicon doing what film's chemistry did. Every point in a Foveon image is measured in full color, top to bottom. It is, almost literally, digital film.

That is why these colors look the way they do: dense, dimensional, drawn rather than computed. And it is why the camera is difficult — slow, power-hungry, hopeless in dim light, its RAW files demanding development by hand. The same trade film asks. The pictures are the argument for making it.

Foveon X3 Merrill, three stacked layers · APS-C · 30mm f/2.8 (45mm equiv) · 2012