Originally Posted by
Tannin
Cheers Matt, good info. Have to laugh at some of the marketingmoron claims they make though.
"Olympus engineer selected the 4/3"-type sensor as being the optimal size to allow smaller cameras capable of high quality images" ... Yer right. As if it was somehow better. Which it wasn't. It was (and is) clearly inferior to (for example) APS-C without offering any substantial benefit in terms of size or weight. On the other hand, it was (of course) better than all the even smaller ones. But it was Olympus' great mistake. It was the decision which finished them as a maker of serious cameras. Olympus wound up being the worst DSLR or the biggest, best, most expensive point and shoot. Not really a happy place - too big to play with the little kids, and not grown up enough to play with the big kids. Sad.
(Disclaimer #1: I'm not given to fanboyism these days, but all through my younger years I had a big teenage crush on Olympus SLRs. (Film cameras in those days.) I used to dream about owning one. Some of that feeling remains to this day. I couldn't find any justification for their DSLRs, of course, but when I recently bought a pocket P&S camera, a really, really cute little Olympus was the one I wanted. Sadly, common sense prevailed and I wound up buying a Canon which was not as tough, nothing like as cute, cost about the same, and had a sensor about five times bigger.)
(Disclaimer #2: having rubbished Olympus for doing something different, I am all in favour of doing things differently and presenting the buyer with a choice between things which really are different, not just different brands of the same thing. (Cough cough, Nikon Canon.) I just wish they'd done something different-and-better instead of different-and-worser.)
"I believe the original idea was that the light hit the sensor more perpendicularly for greater resolution." Wow! This would be an original idea as invented by someone sitting in a cosmic pyramid, eating vitamin supplements, and admiring his degree from the Uri Geller School of Advanced Physics. Nice one!
"Micro Four Thirds' sensor size was determined from judgment of the size limit of the lens made according to the principle high image quality that people can walk with." Funny thing ... this was the exact same reason all those other engineers chose all those other sizes!
"One interesting thing I stumbled on is that sensors are cut out of a circular wafer. The most efficient ratio sensor would be 1:1 square."
Just so. I rather like the idea of a square sensor. But it cuts down your width. You get the most pixels from a given wafer with a square, but you get the longest horizontal with a line. For this reason, all the sensors I have ever seen compromise somewhere in between the two.
Come to think of it, why limit it to four sides? (Or two in the case of a line.) Slip down to some popular attraction where the tourist busses line up to disgorge selfie snappers. Wouldn't many of them be better served by a sensor shaped like a star? Or better yet, a heart?
Waiter!
Fetch a cart and take Tannin away. He's gone ga-ga.