Originally posted by Leumas
There is a difference. CCD and CMOS are not interchangeable as far as color fidelity are concerned. CCD is still used almost exclusively in many high-end applications for various reasons. My own testing confirmed a difference. Read the link above that was posted....that's got some info.
---------- Post added 12-26-19 at 08:53 PM ----------
This is one of the long exposures captured on my K10D recently. Took the exact same pic with the K1 in crop mode using the same lens. There was almost no color in the sky on the K1 version, no matter how much editing I did. Maybe using a 10-stop ND brings out these differences more; who knows.
Again, this isn't an inherent feature of CCD sensors, it's the filter array that makes the difference. The photodiodes behind the filters don't know and don't care about the difference in wavelengths being filtered, they just capture photons. Modern filter arrays have more overlap between the red, green, and blue filters, so whatever wavelengths were in the sky in that scene probably just happened to be passed through both the red and blue filters on the K1. That's an unfortunate side effect of having overlap, but the benefit is that every diode captures more photons overall, thus improving low-light performance. Also, at a sunset like that the lighting can easily change very quickly during the time that it takes to switch cameras. I'm not saying that the K10D didn't produce the more vividly saturated image, but there are a lot of factors that go into how vibrant an image appears, and the use of either CCD or CMOS sensors isn't one of them.
There just isn't a logical reason why a CCD would produce different colours than a CMOS sensor when neither of them are capable of differentiating colour in the first place. They only see what the filter allows them to see, and the final image can only be processed by interpolating whatever data each channel of information provides. I grant you that the overlap of modern filter arrays means that it's harder to separate each of the primary colour channels due to the wavelength overlap, but its usually not a big deal, and it isn't a quality inherent to CMOS sensors themselves.