"pg" wrote ...
There are a lot of 3CCD digital cameras on the market, but so far,
nobody is offering any 5CCD version.

How come?

Because all varieties of color television are based on the three selected
primary colors, red, green, and blue. There is no point breaking up the
spectrum into smaller divisions, because the information would just
have to be encoded back into RGB space to be compatible with all
the color TV infrastructure on the planet.

Note further that going from 3-chip to 5-chip is the wrong direction.
Several quite remarkable color cameras have been produced recently
using one CCD.

If we look at this page www.alt-vision.com/color_prisms_tech_data.htm
we know that prism stacking can produce not only the usual RGB color
separation of the 3CCD type, but also the 5CCD type, if anyone would
want to make one.

My question is --- since I'm not a scientist --- is there any real
benefit of having 5CCD as versus those we get today, the 3CCD ?

There would appear to be no benefit to conventional color television.
I suspect the technology in the reference cited is of interest to non-
television applications.