Fujifilm X-Trans fought moire by scrambling the color grid

Digital cameras often used optical low-pass filters to blur very fine detail before it reached a Bayer-pattern sensor. That suppressed false color and moire, but it also threw away sharpness.

Fujifilm's X-Pro1 took a different route. DPReview described its proprietary X-Trans CMOS sensor as a 6-by-6 color filter array meant to suppress color moire without an anti-aliasing filter.

The patent family describes square 6-by-6 basic array patterns for color imaging elements. The trick was to trade a harder demosaicing problem for a cleaner optical path.

Make the sensor less periodic

Changing the sampling pattern attacked aliasing before image processing began.

Removing the low-pass filter let lenses deliver more fine detail to the sensor.

The idea borrowed from film grain's less regular structure rather than copying the standard Bayer grid.

It gave Fujifilm a sensor identity competitors could not copy with mere styling.

If the enemy is a repeating artifact, the fix may be to remove the repetition at the physical sampling layer, not to blur the result afterward.

X-Trans became a signature feature of Fujifilm's higher-end X-series cameras. It also forced RAW processors to handle a more complex demosaicing problem, showing the tradeoff between optical sharpness and computational convenience.