You can learn more about this by looking up "debayering" or "demosaicing", the process by which 4 pixels with color filters are combined into 1 pixel of color i

You can learn more about this by looking up "debayering" or "demosaicing", the process by which 4 pixels with color filters are combined into 1 pixel of color information. But it still has 4 pixels worth of spatial information. Sorta. If you're willing to make some assumptions. It's a messy process That's why shooting with raw files is so popular; these grab the data from the sensor before the debayering, since some post-processing operations work better if they're earlier in the processing pipeline.