14 DAY TRIAL // Back in February 2014, photo gear maker Sigma announced not just one but three new compact cameras, in the form of DP1, DP2 and DP3 Quatrro units. All of these products came bundled with the new Foveon X3 multi-layered sensor tech, which is simply dubbed “Quatrro.”
A few months later, talking to popular Japanese website / retailer Yodabashi, Sigma CEO Kazuto Yamaki offered a few details about the future of Quatrro tech and its upcoming implementations.
Yamaki revealed the sensor would be implemented into a “SLR SD body” prompting speculation that a new SD-series DSLR camera was in the pipeline.
At this point, you might be wondering what’s so particularly special about Sigma’s new sensor. Well, for starters, it’s made up of three sheets of pixels. The one on top is used to filter blue light, the one in the middle filters green light, while the bottom one takes care of red light.
The middle and bottom layers combined offer about 5MP of power, while the top one stretches things further on to 20MP.
The result of this combination is that the current DP1, DP2 and DP3 Quatrro cameras are able to shoot RAW imagery at 19.6MP. However, the devices boast an extra mode called Super-High JPEG, which lets users snap images at 39.6MP in JPG format.
For the moment, only the DP2 is getting ready to make a debut on the market (most likely towards the end of this month). The camera arrives with a 30mm f/2.8 lens, while the DP1 and DP3 boast 19 f/2.8 and 50mm f/2.8 lenses, respectively, and will be out before 2014 comes to an end.
Anyway, going back to the interview with Kazuto Yamaki, most of the talk focused on the DP Quattro series, but as it eventually happens in such interviews, a few spicy details managed to slip out.
So, apparently, we’re going to see a new Sigma SD DSLR camera in the wild, one that’s taking advantage of the multi-layered Quattro sensor.
It would be particularly thrilling to see Sigma roll out a new DSLR, especially since we haven’t seen a similar product come out of the company since 2012. Back then, the device maker pushed the SD1 Merril, but a lot of time has passed by since then and the category certainly needs a refresh.
The Sigma SD1 Merrill is still up for grabs in online retail locations like Amazon. We should keep our eyes on the company at Photokina to see if the new DSLR makes an appearance. Hopefully it will.