capture the emotion of that crucial moment, and turn it into a fantastic shot. The only cameras designed to do just that, by combining the technology for serious photographic expression with highly-portable compactness, belong to Sigma's DP series. Meshing neatly with your personal lifestyle and your inner life, the DP2 is designed to take you deeper into a whole new world of photographic expression.Features:Full Scale SensorAt 20.7 x 13.8mm, the DP2's 14-megapixel image sensor is SLR-sized. This is about 12 times larger than the 1- to 2.5-inch sensor, and 7 times larger than a 1- to 1.8-inch sensor used in a conventional digital compact. This generous size takes the DP2's image quality to a different dimension.Direct Image SensorImages produced by Sigma's SD series cameras, and by the DP1, have what's been called an “emotional quality”. The emotion comes with a level of image quality that only the Foveon X3 direct image sensor can deliver. Image quality of a clarity and exquisiteness easily outclassing that of conventional digital cameras. This level of image quality reproduces the scene you shot, right down to the feeling in the air. It's only possible in a vertical color-capture system that does not require color interpolation, and an image-processing system that does not require an optical low-pass filter.Integral LensSigma believes that a photo is only as good as the lens it was taken with. So we decided that the kind of quality we wanted for the DP2 would not be attainable using the traditional techniques used to design standard lenses. We rethought the design from the development stage, and set out in pursuit of the highest possible lens performance. We took the bold step of using a retrofocus lens of the type mainly used as wide-angle lenses for SLRs.Besides having the excellent telecentricity vital in lenses for digital cameras, this retrofocus lens has many other advantages: for example, this format makes it easy to suppress field curvature and astigmatism, and to ensure that the light volume stays the same right to the periphery. However the lens does need to be longer. Therefore, in order to minimize the total length of the lens while still attaining ideal image quality, we used two groups of lens elements: the group at the front have a high refractive index, and the group at the rear are aspherical glass-mold lenses. This way, we successfully developed a standard lens with a relatively modest overall length, but very high optical performance.Image CapabilityThe JPEG files from the DP2 are output in YCbCr 4:2:2 in compliance with the Exchangeable image file format (Exif) specification, which is the standard specification for file formats. But in the direct image sensor, each pixel location cap  (less)