OK, so stop listening to the marketing people and think about it.
The most technically sensible sensor is square. A square sensor uses 88%
of the image circle of the lens and 35mm uses 59%, or only 2/3 of the
square. With a square, you minimize the size, weight and cost of the
lens relative to the amount of information gathered. On the other hand
the public doesn't particularly like square pictures. If you don't
believe this, you haven't looked at the history of photography and don't
know how much market research goes into something like a new film format
such as APS. So the compromise is a format as close to square as
possible. (There is probably lots of market research on this, too.).
Once that is established and turns out to be fairly close to 4:3, a
standard in TV and computer monitors, the die is cast.
There is no way DCs not based on old 35mm lenses will move toward less
square formats in the forseeable future. The 16:9 of HDTV, for example,
would require a 22% larger diameter lens than a 4:3 image with the same
height. This means a lens area 50% larger. And since lens elements of
the same shape get thicker at the center or edge as they get bigger,
weight goes up even faster than area. Panorama shots in consumer cameras
will continue to come from cropping, internal mechanical (35mm),
automated printing (APS) or electronic (DC, once sensor sizes get big
enough).
And yes, it's true, there is less waste (7%) of image info in printing
4:3 to 8X10 and the other matching ratio sizes than printing 35mm to the
same ratio (20%), but I suspect that had only a small weight in
determining the image dimension ratio.
Moose
Thomas Bryhn wrote:
I've been thinking along the same lines. Making images to fit a
certain paper size sounds like a pretty silly constraint, something
only a marketing department could come up with. Shouldn't paper be
made to fit the images?
I'm actually amazed there aren't more papers precut to fit the usual
modern aspect ratios like 2:3, 1:2 or even 1:3 or 2:5.
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