Anti-Aliasing Filter, necessary or not ?

Most digital cameras have a built-in anti-aliasing (AA) filter over the image sensor. The purpose of the AA filter is to limit the detail presented to the sensor so that sampling artefacts such as Moire patterns do not show up on the digital image. There seems to be an increasing interest in cameras made specially without an AA filter over the sensor (such as the Nikon D800E) which claim increased sharpness over a similar sensor fitted with an AA filter. The images produced may appear sharper, but the image detail is not necessarily representative of reality, since the sharper edges are in fact sampling artefacts. Sampling theory applies equally well to music recordings. Taking the AA filter off an audio recording system would introduce non-musical aliases which would sound most unpleasant. However, the ear (in the frequency domain) and the eye (in the spatial domain) respond to alias components in different ways. Audio aliases are unmusical but spatial aliases which give an apparent increase in image sharpness may be seen as advantageous by some people. I can see that architectural and landscape photographers might like the effect.

Personally, I prefer my images to be as representative as possible of the image captured by the lens. Therefore I don't think I would want a camera which does not have an AA filter. Anyone else have a view ?  

I agree it would be nice to try these experiments, Dave, but I don't think my manual dexterity would be good enough to take things apart around the sensor. Having said that, the price of second-hand DSLRs has come down so much it might be tempting to play.

My post was really just testing to see if people thought the removal of the AA filter was just a fad or had any real benefit. It might just be an excuse to charge more for a camera which has something omitted !