It seems like the Foveon sensor should be able to produce better images, because it's not dependent on the separate red, green, and blue pixels as exist on most digital cameras. However, cameras equipped with Foveon sensors are pretty much nonexistant. Why?
(Side note: This question was inspired by Bayer Filter answer where the Bayer filter potentially caused problems...)
Answer
What happened is that Sigma bought Foveon and put a lot of pressure on them to produce a sensor that is actually capable of competing with standard DSLR sensors. Now that Sigma is building the whole camera and sensor, there is a lot more focus on producing a compelling end-product.
Last year Sigma announced the SD1 which uses an APS-C (1.5X crop) sensor with 15 million photosites. They way they count Sigma calls it a 46 megapixels sensor. They have not released many details to members of the press (me at least) but is expected to be available by this summer.
There are still several Sigma cameras (DP1x, DP2s, SD15) in production which use the 1.7X Foveon sensor with 4.5 million photosites (aka 14 megapixels).
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