Abstract: A digital color imager provides an extended luminance range, enabling a method for an easy transformation into all other color spaces having luminance as a component. White pixels are added to hexagonal red, green and blue pixels. These white pixels can alternatively have an extended dynamic range as described by U.S. Pat. No. (6,441,852 to Levine et al.). Especially the white pixels may have a larger size than the red, green, or blue pixels used. This larger size can be implemented by concatenation of “normal” size hexagonal white pixels. The output of said white pixels can be directly used for the luminance values Y of the destination color space. Therefore only the color values have to be calculated from the RGB values, leading to an easier and faster calculation. As an example chosen by the inventor the conversion to YCbCr color space has been shown in detail.