Inside the camera is a Foveon-developed imager head that incorporates 3 sensors and a color separating prism. The prism is designed so that light entering it is split into red, green and blue components and then focused on each of three 2Kx2K CMOS sensors. Using a prism greatly enhances the system's ability to capture color that is purer than that captured by single-chip single-shot cameras using mosaic filters to create a color image. Further, by placing sensors on each of the 3 prism exit faces, the color of each point in the subject is sampled by three pixels (one red, one green and one blue).

The alternative color mosaic filter method that is used in all other one shot digital cameras, samples the color using only one pixel and guesses at what the other two might be.