@Anonymous: no, it is not an SLR. It is better. And it is mine. I shoot with the same sensor being used on The Hobbit and that blows my mind every time I hit record.

@noahvolek: As long as that's the only thing blowing, I'm fine with this.

@Anonymous: What I heard: Because any image editor ever turning color photos into black&white while preserving the original is overrated.
Sarcasm successfully dodged.

@noahvolek: Oh, I am very aware of the power that RED camera has. It's a very powerful image capture device on your hands and yes, I am JELLY!!!!

@Anonymous: reminds me of my first one...

110 film and snap-on flashcubes FTW

@uncle_tyrone: that's good, i hate it when my photos come out all unaccordingly

@mradmack: it... it's beautiful O_O

@Anonymous: is that digital or film? cuz i can't figure out how a film camera gets rated as monochrome-only. but on the other hand, why you'd have a mono-only digital except for some pretty specialist uses...

@Anonymous: Lens is a bit chunky for a rangefinder, that's not going to fit in anything but the most generous of trenchcoat pockets. Surely it's a "bridge"? Or, is the lens a 4/3rds interchangeable type, so you can make it a little slimmer when needed?

@tahrey: it's digital. they basically removed the color filter array (CFA) in front of the sensor. Leica claims that the pix are sharper because the cam doesnt have to split the light into colors.
of course it costs about 7k and since overexposure usually happens in only one of the 3 color channels, you're usually still able to get a usuable pic (after some tweaking). with a true colorblind camera any overexposure is absolute. you know what they say: "once your pic goes white..." nah, wait...that doesnt sound right

@Anonymous: Overexposure of that kind only happens if you leave it in full-auto mode and save as JPG rather than RAW, which I doubt someone who'd be motivated to buy one of those would do... HDR-RAW doesn't oversaturate anywhere near as much. And I don't ever recall an image doing it on just one channel; otherwise the pic would go pastel red / green / blue rather than white in the washout areas. If the other channels were still within the normal range, there'd be recoverable image information and it wouldn't be a total washout (literally).

Mind you that's sort of how I figured they did it.

The sharpness is a moot point, and really it depends on what megapixelage they've specced it for. An 8mpx colour camera would have the same colour resolution per channel (or effectively 1.4x for green, in a lot of cases) as a 2mpx one of these. The difference would come from a reduction in moire (not that common an issue anymore except with low pixel counts and high digital zoom on very complex subjects), and a decided improvement in light sensitivity as each subpixel is now no longer receiving, on average, only 1/3rd of all the visible light frequencies coming in to the camera. Even if you extract the greyscale RAW and use that without re-colouring, with some whole-scene intensity adjustment, you'll get additional resolution, but less light overall (more noise, more chance of black-outs) and odd geometric (dithery) effects in different coloured areas thanks to the filter patterning.

So if you need excellent low light performance with pin sharp, smooth-edged performance from an already high-end (but colour) CCD, I guess it's your guy. Like I said, specialist :-)

@Anonymous:
I suppose there are them who'd make use of it. For everyone else, there's the backside illumination CCDs currently coming into use in the most recent generation of smartphones and consumer digicams. Or in extreme cases, some kind of equally exotic 3-CCD camera which would combine the best of both worlds? (captures very nearly the same amount of light, at the same resolution, but you can choose for the photon energy to be split between the three channels in a colour shot, or combined into a lower-noise but monochrome image, same way that it's possible to get a brighter, less noisy pic from reducing the resolution with a particular digital convolution filter)

@tahrey: Seeing that you seem to invest not a little time and/or money into your camera, judging by what you have to say on this topic, I'd assume that you'd want the pictures to look accordingly. If my way of putting things appears somewhat unusual or quaint to you, it is because your fair language is not my mother tongue, alas.

@uncle_tyrone: Chill, it was a bit of a joke. I assumed you'd accidentally a word.

I think I sort of know what you actually meant, but I'm having trouble thinking of the exact wording as well...

Also I love how your ever-so-slightly off interpretation of english sounds like an upper class oxford graduate from an alternate universe version of the 1890s. ^_^