[r4pha]

I might be wrong, but I think adding color information would not be _that_ hard. Basically you could filter each sensor cell for one of the RGB colors and just interpolate the results for each color channel. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demosaicing

[JamesMcMinn]

That's exactly how the majority of digial cameras work today: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer_filter