Digitalcameraworld believes MFT manufacturers should make cameras with square sensors

Digitalcameraworld writes:

The MFT format does have the advantage of much smaller, lighter, less expensive and sometimes better lenses, but that’s a pretty subtle argument. What I think it needs is a single killer feature that no other maker has. And I think this might be it.

What we need is an oversize, square, multi-aspect sensor which offers no resolution penalty for swapping aspect ratios, allows vertical shooting without rotating the camera, and maybe even automatic horizon leveling?

My diagram shows how this would work. With an oversize square sensor, changing the aspect ratio simply means trading width against height, resolution-wise. You don’t lose lots of megapixels by swapping ratios as you do with a regular sensor. Even the ‘worst’ crop, which is 16:9, brings a pretty modest loss in megapixels, and for 4K filming there’s already resolution to spare in modern sensors, so captured footage would be oversampled anyway.

The diagram makes some rough calculations. Assuming the ‘native’ square format is 20 megapixels, here’s how the other formats pan out:

1:1 (square): 20MP
4:3 (regular MFT ratio): 18.9MP
3:2 (APS-C and full frame ratio): 18.6MP
16:9 (video): 17MP

What do you think about this?