Sigma has been working on a new full-frame Foveon sensor for nearly a decade and speaking to PetaPixel last week ahead of the CP+ show in Yokohama, CEO Kazuto Yamaki explained that it was still in development but wouldn’t guarantee it would make it to market.
When asked about the progress of its development, Yamaki confirmed that his team was still working on the Foveon full-frame sensor.
“We are still working on it. We have the project team who’s been working on this project. Unfortunately, it’s been taking more time, much more time than we expected, and it’s delayed, delayed, delayed. Because every time we make a prototype, we find some technical issues, but we are making progress little by little because we already promised to deliver the products with the Foveon sensor,” Yamaki said in an interview with Chris Niccolls on the PetaPixel Podcast last week.
When asked if Yamaki and Sigma were still committed to releasing a camera with a full-frame Foveon sensor, however, Yamaki wouldn’t definitively say.
“We will do our best,” he said, choosing his words carefully.
This 2025 update is very similar in tone to Yamaki’s update on progress from this same point in 2024. Back then, Sigma was expecting a new prototype of the sensor to arrive mid-year with previously discovered errors corrected.
“This test chip is very important because we are testing two things. One is a new pixel architecture, but I think that part is not so challenging. The most challenging part is a new manufacturing process.”
Based on his response last week, it does not sound as though that prototype arrived free of problems. While he did not go into more detail, the tenor of Yamaki’s response seems to indicate that there has not been much progress.
The full-frame Foveon sensor has been in development at Sigma since 2016. In those nine years, Sigma has done its best to be open and honest with photographers about the progress of the development and Yamaki has been unusually frank about the project when compared to how CEOs typically discuss projects.
“Our customers are patiently waiting for the announcement from us. So I think we need to be very open and honest to those customers,” he said last year. “Please know that our engineers are still working hard to make it happen. But right now, I personally cannot guarantee to go to mass production at this moment, but the engineers are still working hard.”
Given Yamaki’s reluctance again this year to promise that the full-frame Foveon sensor would reach mass production, photographers should keep hopes tempered.
Foveon’s Practicality
It is difficult to determine if Foveon has a solid place in modern camera development since so much about how it has changed over the last decade is unknown. The last time Sigma released a Foveon sensor, they suffered from excessive power draw and were heavily processor-dependent. That said, battery and processor technology has advanced significantly since then, so it is possible these issues would be less of a problem in a new camera. Foveon did finally get DNG support, which resolved the other major problem with the technology — clunky proprietary software.
The last time a Foveon sensor came to market, these downsides were worth it to some photographers for the benefits of Foveon: extra resolution and excellent color fidelity. The image quality potential was always high and compared to older sensors, continued development showed real potential. However, in the past 10 years, typical Bayer Filter sensor technology has improved significantly and it’s unclear if Foveon would provide that much of an improvement over a currently available full-frame 60-megapixel sensor.
If a full-frame Foveon sensor were to be released today, it may be novel and interesting, but practically speaking, unless it dramatically outshined what a Bayer sensor could do — which is anything but certain — it would be hard to rationalize what is likely to be a more expensive, slower sensor. That said, if Foveon could deliver medium format levels of resolution and dynamic range yet be full-frame in size and format, then there might be potential.
Unfortunately, the amount of time that has passed and the repeated issues Sigma has faced in its development so far may indicate that the juice might not be worth the squeeze, so to speak.
Image credits: Sigma
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