The Future of Sensors

Recently there has been a rumor that the Sony A99 will have a 16:9 720p OLED electronic viewfinder.

Add to that the resent announcement of the Canon C300, and its 16:9 format sensor and and HD electronic viewfinder and optional displays out the wazoo. All for 16:9

Our computer screens are mostly 16:9 or so. Our laptop screens are 16:9 in general. Our smart phones are 16:9 or close to it.

Oh wait, Last but not least. Our TV's are 16:9.

Not hard to predict that soon all camera sensors will be 16:9 to match the display systems. The only thing left is print. Which is not 16:9.

davidfig wrote in post #13365493
The only thing left is print. Which is not 16:9.

And print is still the vast majority of the commercial market for still photos, so that's not a small obstacle!


I can just see trying to crop a vertical 16:9 into a 8x10 frame.....

I shoot landscapes and would welcome 16:9.

It's not quite 612 or 617 panoramic format, but it's getting closer...

Better to have a high-resolution landscape sensor and cropping to fit squarer formats for portraiture or photojournalism, where the lower resolution doesn't matter so much, rather than having a high-resolution square or 4:3 sensor, then cropping to a low-resolution landscape (where it matters a lot).

I do a fair bit of stitching myself, but, to me, stitching is a fairly limited technique, as is shooting with dome-fronted lenses which can't take filters.

At sunrise and sunset, light changes quickly. If clouds are involved and there is any sort of a wind, the sky also changes quickly. When exposures run into the 10 second range or longer, there can be significant differences between one exposure and the next, whether the exposures are side-by-side for stitching, or at different shutter speeds for image blending due to the inability to use filters. Hence my endless waiting for a panoramic camera, or a regular sensor large enough to not worry about cropping half of it to produce a panoramic format.

Still, you can get it to work if the shutter speed isn't too slow and you can do some creative blending:

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tkbslc wrote in post #13365632
And print is still the vast majority of the commercial market for still photos, so that's not a small obstacle!


I can just see trying to crop a vertical 16:9 into a 8x10 frame.....

Granted its not a small thing to get 16:9 in print. But with HDTV merging TV and movie screens and more non-standard prints being made. It seems natural that digital cameras will move in that direction.

It might be that we never rotate our cameras anymore, just crop.

Shadowblade wrote in post #13366330
I shoot landscapes and would welcome 16:9.

It's not quite 612 or 617 panoramic format, but it's getting closer...

Better to have a high-resolution landscape sensor and cropping to fit squarer formats for portraiture or photojournalism, where the lower resolution doesn't matter so much, rather than having a high-resolution square or 4:3 sensor, then cropping to a low-resolution landscape (where it matters a lot).

OK. But I shoot portraits. Better to use a wider lens and crop for your wide shots if you ask me than cropping to a lower resolution portrait.