Black and White Digital

My point was that if you remove all the filters then all the pixels would only be looking at tone/birghtness.

I think I'm out of my depth, all I can say is that a black and white TV gives a better picture than watching a black and white film on a colout TV.

You are correct with that one.
I know you can get sensors without a colour filter.
With astrophotography for example some use such sensors and use red, green and blue filters to make a coloured photo from them so they are out there, you just need to find a good match.

Stefan, you're absolutely correct about the colours and sensitivity, but it could simply be ignored, or the processing could get very, very clever indeed and compensate.

I suspect the latter thought would take a huge amount of processing power!

John, how can something that is physically in front of the sensor be ignored, that's the part where you lose me?

What I mean is that I agree that the tonal balance would be potentially incorrect, but we could ignore that problem and process anyway.

I'm not sure what the effect of that would be, but it might be acceptable for some images and less so for others.

As Nikon made the statement we can assume that they meant it, that there was increased resolution in black and white and that they had countered this problem in some way.

I'm just speculating as to how the problem was approached.

You have a black and white TV???

On topic, I think the only advantage of a B&W sensor would be pixel count, which itself causes noise problems, which need more processing power to compensate...

I'll stick with film for mono and the occasional PP conversion thanks.