Why is 16:9 uncommon for professional still photography?
Asked 1/6/2022
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Some Sony camcorders can save still images in a 16:9 format, but most professional still photography is traditionally shot and printed in ratios like 3:2 or 4:3. Why hasn’t 16:9 become a common standard for fine-art or professional print photography? Is it mainly historical, technical, or related to how camera sensors and lenses are designed?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
4y ago
2 Answers
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I expect that this is mostly due to technical limitations. DatAperture wrote it very nicely on Reddit:
Lenses project circular images. To get the most resolution out of a lens, you should use a circular sensor. But those would be really wasteful to produce en masse (imagine how much you'd waste cutting circles out of a sensor wafer), so we have to use 4-sided polygons. Theoretically, a square would be the best way to use a maximum amount of that circle's light. But a square is weird; you'd have to crop like every image. So, 4:3 and 3:2 are the solution: not quite a square, but not widescreen 16:9 either. Maximum amount of surface area from the lens's image circle without being a square. You can always crop to 16:9 later, but if you crop a 4:3 out of a 16:9 size sensor, you've just lost a huge amount of usable pixels.
Besides this, many people don't like the format much and have trouble making a nice crop with it, but that can also be because they are not used to it. There is a thread on DPReview about this subject.
Originally by user40887. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user40887
4y ago
0
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Mostly because 16:9 is a less efficient and less traditional shape for still photography.
Technically, camera lenses project a circular image. Rectangular sensors are inscribed within that circle, and squarer formats use more of the available image circle. Compared with a square, 4:3 uses about 96% of the available area, 3:2 about 92%, and 16:9 only about 85.5%. So a 16:9 sensor wastes more of the lens’s image circle, or if you crop to 16:9 from 3:2/4:3, you throw away pixels.
Historically, still photography standards were established long before widescreen displays became common. The 35mm still-photo format became 24×36mm, giving the familiar 3:2 ratio, and that ratio carried forward into film, printing, and camera design. Other systems also settled on relatively compact rectangles like 4:3.
In practice, 16:9 is useful for video and for display on widescreen screens, but it’s less flexible as a capture format for general still photography. Photographers can always crop a 3:2 or 4:3 image wider later, but starting with 16:9 gives up height and compositional flexibility from the start.
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