A colour camera is usually a monochrome sensor wearing a mosaic of filters. Each well is allowed to see only red, or green, or blue. The ISP then guesses the missing two colours from the neighbours. That mosaic is the colour filter array, the CFA.
In one sentence. Colour is a filter. Mono keeps all the light. RGB-IR and RCCB are other filters for other jobs. None of them is "better" without the scene.
Bayer, the default
RGGB is what most people mean by a colour sensor. It is cheap to process and well supported. You pay with resolution (you interpolated) and with light (each well threw away two thirds of the spectrum).
Mono
No mosaic. Every well sees the whole visible band, and often a useful slice of NIR. For OCR, barcodes, measurement, and night, this is usually the right camera wearing the wrong brochure. People ask for colour because phones are colour. Machines often do not need it.
The other mosaics
- RGB-IR. Some wells see infrared on purpose. Day colour and night NIR on one die, if the IR-cut and the ISP know the map.
- RCCB / RYYCy / CYYM. Different bets on sensitivity versus hue. Read the CFA line. Do not assume Bayer.
- B/W as a filter on Camemaker. That radio is the mono cut. Use it when colour is not the job.
The fruit-bowl test
A bowl of apples looks wrong if the mosaic or the IR-cut is wrong: muddy reds, a cyan banana, a face that goes magenta at the edge. A Data Matrix on the same table does not care. If your product reads codes, stop buying Bayer because the demo page looked pretty.
How to use the library
On the sensor page, CFA and the B/W radio are the same decision as the lens IR-cut. A mono sensor behind a strong IR-cut is a mono sensor you dimmed. A Bayer sensor with no IR-cut is a colour camera that turns purple in sunlight. Pick them as a pair.