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Sony uses a 16:9 (1.778) aspect ratio for still photos taken from its camcorders. As a guideline, panoramic photos commonly are 3:1, which is wider, while medium format are well-known to be half that at 3:2 (1.5) aspect ratio.

I've never come across 16:9 photographs in professional print or fine art. Why is this size so unusual?

user610620
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  • This question is likely to be answered with opinions rather than facts and citations. It should be updated so it will lead to fact-based answers. – Romeo Ninov Jan 06 '22 at 06:48
  • Do you know of any famous photos that had a 16:9 aspect ratio? – user610620 Jan 06 '22 at 06:50
  • Please define "famous" – Romeo Ninov Jan 06 '22 at 07:22
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    Did you notice that most famous paintings aren't in 16:9 either (except a few frescoes, such as Picasso's "Guernica") – xenoid Jan 06 '22 at 10:10
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    If 16:9 has become the standard for motion picture, it's strange that it didn't also for professional static photographers – user610620 Jan 06 '22 at 10:23
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    I think any answer to this is going to be opinion-based, but from my own personal perspective, I do find it irritating my printed canvas supplier has every size from postage stamp to A0 & larger, in every format…except 16:9. 2:1 is too narrow, 5:4, 4:3 or 3:2 is sometimes 'just wrong' for me. [Sure, I can pay for a custom size, but that quadruples my prices] I often publish to 'web' at 16:9, because it fits fullscreen better - know your target audience. – Tetsujin Jan 06 '22 at 12:52
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    @user610620, photos inherit (more or less) the format of paintings. Motion picture is much, much younger than painting so this may explain the reason why 16:9 is less used in photography. – Romeo Ninov Jan 06 '22 at 13:16
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    I think it's a fair question. I've wondered in the past myself where these "standard" aspect ratios came from. Medium format isn't necessarily 3:2 though... 6x6, 6x7 are very common medium format sizes (along with 645 of course). 6x8, 6x9, 6x12 and 6x17 are also formats found amongst medium format cameras. 3:2 is more a "standard" with smaller format photography. – osullic Jan 06 '22 at 17:49
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    @xenoid Picasso's Guernica is neither a fresco nor is it 16:9 – osullic Jan 06 '22 at 17:53
  • @Tetsujin yes, lack of 16:9 physical frames is a real fact that motivated this question in the first place. But think if entire markets refuse to adopt a new aspect ratio standard that has remained only prevalent in video, then there's something deeply embedded in the photography scene that is rejecting and just not taking to that new standard for some reason. Trying to find out what that is. – user610620 Jan 06 '22 at 19:05
  • @RomeoNinov There is a standard ratio for paintings? I must have seen tens of thousands of paintings in my life time, from the Middle Ages till the current age. Painters have used all kinds of aspect ratios; I've never noticed a common ratio. – Abigail Jan 09 '22 at 15:06

5 Answers5

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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.

inkista
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Orbit
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    Not only technical limitations. Plenty of action photos would waste a lot of space in a 16:9 format (plus you would have to edit all the distracting things in the background). Not speaking of portrait... Also still a lot of photography ends up in print, and 16:9 doesn't work well with usual print formats. – xenoid Jan 06 '22 at 15:37
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    @xenoid: Very true, but on the other hand, it could work very well for landscapes. There is probably a reason why TV developed towards 16:9. And this problem also applies to video, it seems to work there. I think the print format is not so relevant, that should follow the most common sensors being sold. If most were 16:9, it would probably be the most popular print format. – Orbit Jan 06 '22 at 15:45
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    If there is something I learned by doing photography is that we don't look at movies like we look at still images. In movies we look at the subject (in practice we haven't got the time to look at anything else) and what happens in the corners is irrelevant since it is mostly a space filler, while In a still image the eye wanders all over, and perphaps we don't like to scan something too wide (there is a reason why newpapers are printed in columns). – xenoid Jan 06 '22 at 15:52
  • Could use an anamorphic lens to distort a wide aspect ratio view into a squarish piece of sensor and then the inverse into print. – D Duck Jan 06 '22 at 16:49
  • @Orbit you struck a nerve here. Circular sensors could very well be the technical reason that explains why 16:9 adoption in static photography is so poor. So you're saying that 16:9 sensors are only dominant in video, but still not in static photography? The unavailability of physical 16:9 frames seems to rebuff its adoption even further as if it can never happen then. – user610620 Jan 06 '22 at 19:12
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    @xenoid "a lot of photography ends up in print, and 16:9 doesn't work well with usual print formats" makes this unfortunately a circuitous What should come first the chicken or the egg paradox. If 16:9 sensors become dominant in static photography, only then would the supply of16:9 print frames increase, would you say? – user610620 Jan 06 '22 at 19:14
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    Cinema sensors are generally the same aspect ratio as stills cameras, so "wasting space" isn't a good argument. Shooting anamorphic squeezes info into that 4:3 sensor better, but not everyone shoots anamorphic. 'Regular' TV shoots straight into 4:3 sensors but crops to a bit bigger than 16:9. The monitors then have a 16:9 inset rectangle for the broadcast area [plus some other safety lines not important to this discussion] Film/TV is my 'day job', photography is a hobby, but I'm so used to seeing things in 16:9 that perhaps that influences my photography. – Tetsujin Jan 06 '22 at 19:22
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    tbh I love what you can do in 16:9 that 4:3 can't capture. Sometimes it feels 'baggy'. – Tetsujin Jan 06 '22 at 19:26
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    @user610620 Not circuitous. You have to look how you would fit a 16:9 picture among text. Make a headshot of someone in 16:9, and you waste 5x the area. Yes, some 16:9 images fit, but a whole lot wouldn't. In fact, look at the sheer variety of aspect ratios used in print images. 16:9 is just one possibility. – xenoid Jan 06 '22 at 20:27
  • @Orbit "many people don't like the format much and have trouble making a nice crop with it" means that word processing/photo processing software are somewhat a contributing culprit to the lack of adoption of 16:9. After all, it is the software that sends the signal to the printer. Then again, industry grade printers probably default to industry standards that omit 16:9 as being one of them, so that the software sending the input is seldom selected at 16:9. – user610620 Jan 06 '22 at 20:53
  • @Tetsujin "Wasting space" is a fine argument, when the output format for your work isn't fixed. As a film/TV professional, you know that any images you capture are going to have a 16:9 aspect (or wider!). You have no real use for a taller image, because cropping after would just be more work and wouldn't buy you anything anyway. (You can't change the cropping on a moving image frame-by-frame, after all. Better to just make sure everyone's in-shot to begin with.) But with still images, every frame can be cropped uniquely, and to any size/aspect. So you capture as much as you can initially. – FeRD Jan 06 '22 at 21:21
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    As a related question, we could consider, "Why don't videographers turn the camera on its side when they want to shoot in a portrait aspect?" But none of us would likely ask that, because it sounds completely daft. ...Thing is, if you ever hand a photographer a video camera, there's a good chance they may actually do that at some point, because it tends to be second-nature for them. (I've seen it happen!) Despite using the same equipment, capturing video and taking still photos are vastly different activities. – FeRD Jan 06 '22 at 21:28
  • @FeRD - just to be devil's advocate for a minute… sure you can crop moving images in post. You can even have a moving crop - zoom in then back out again or pan a zoomed image in the frame. It's done all the time, you just can't tell the difference between that & a camera move or lens zoom. Also, yootoob, farcebork, instagrump etc are full of videos shot portrait by people with phones. – Tetsujin Jan 07 '22 at 08:27
  • I'm surprised someone hasn't made a hexagonal CCD / CMOS sensor yet. They would tile on the plane, fill a greater proportion of the lens's area, have nice addressing schemes [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexagonal_Efficient_Coordinate_System] and would fill a greater proportion of a silicon die for a given sensor area. I think CERN have tried this for radiation reasons (search for CLICdp hexagons) but no major camera manufacturer as far as I can tell. Of course, there's a hell of a lot of postprocessing you'd have to do afterwards but it might well end up working better in low light... – Landak Jan 07 '22 at 14:36
  • @Landak You can't easily cut hexagons out of the silicon wafer though. – mbrig Jan 08 '22 at 01:36
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    Heh. Oh, plenty of companies/researchers have experimented with weird CCD designs. I'll see your hexagonal die idea, and raise you octagonal PIXELS laid out at a 45° angle to the output image. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_CCD – FeRD Jan 08 '22 at 09:15
  • @Landak Packing the die with pixels isn't the overriding concern, though. You can pack more hex pixels into an area, sure, but you'd want a similarly-laid-out hex-pixel display to reproduce the resulting images. If the pixels don't map to the output you'll get weird jaggies where the alignment doesn't match. No amount of postprocessing can align two different coordinate systems. (Hence Fujifilm's 45°-tilted octagonal grid, which does resolve to a rectangular grid once you tilt it back. Nevertheless, they still abandoned the design after just over a decade and went back to square pixels.) – FeRD Jan 08 '22 at 09:38
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    I don't see how this is relevant. If I use a 1:1 sensor to optimize lens usage, I'm still going to get on my computer and crop it to 16:9, wasting exactly as much information as if I'd just cropped the sensor. Further, I'm wasting money on a sensor with a bunch of pixels I'm not using. Those extra pixels are only useful if people with the camera like square/4:3 ratios for some reason (that reason being the correct answer here). It's also harder to line up a shot if my square viewfinder display doesn't match the final image. – MichaelS Jan 09 '22 at 09:09
  • Also, a 16:9 sensor cropped to 4:3 wastes 25% of the pixels. A 4:3 sensor cropped to 16:9 also wastes 25% of the pixels. 4:3 is only better if you do more 4:3 shots. – MichaelS Jan 09 '22 at 09:16
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    @xenoid: The reason newspapers are printed in columns has nothing to do with photography. It's easier to scan from the right end of one row to the left end of the next row (and scan to the correct row) if we don't have to move our eyes as far, and it's easier to read text if it's big enough to make out the symbols. Ergo, rows work best if they stay below a certain width relative to the font size. Newspapers often use small fonts with wide pages, so they use multiple columns to make it easier to read. – MichaelS Jan 09 '22 at 09:24
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    @michaelS That's my point... If it easier to read narrow columbs, it is possibly easier to look at a "narrow" photo. Plus photos are often embedded in text, so narrow pictures are easier to manage than wide ones. – xenoid Jan 09 '22 at 09:44
  • @xenoid: Narrow text columns are specifically easier to read because we're tracking a straight line to another, specific, straight line. On a photograph, there's no need to jump from one detail to another, specific detail, so having the details close together doesn't help anything. My browser is set so the answer above is about 8" wide on a 32"-wide monitor about 30" from my face. Any wider starts to be difficult to read. I prefer images to fill up the entire screen, even zoomed-in stuff like Netflix. Panoramic shots could still look good on a triple monitor setup. – MichaelS Jan 09 '22 at 09:53
  • There's a fairly narrow cone of vision where we can make out individual lines of text as lines of text. Since our brain knows where the line is even when we're not looking right at it, we can quickly jump to that point. If the line extends too far out of that cone, we have to manually track across it to find the end. Also, wider images are better in some print, like a banner spanning two columns. – MichaelS Jan 09 '22 at 09:57
  • Don't forget, newspapers, books, and magazines were using narrow columns long before photography existed. Drawings and other illustrations used in newspapers had aspect ratios appropriate to fit the width of those columns. So it naturally followed that photos used in print media that was primarily text based would also have fairly narrow widths. – Michael C Jan 09 '22 at 16:13
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Adding on to @Orbit's answer regarding area of an inscribed rectangle in a circle, the following graph shows the area of 4:3, 3:2, and 16:9 aspect ratios.

Area versus aspect ratio

Area versus aspect ratio:
square: 100% (maximum area inscribed by a rectangle in a circle)
4:3: 96.0%
3:2: 92.3%
16:9: 85.5%

Nothing earth-shattering, but, you get about 10% better area utilization of the image circle using 4:3 versus 16:9.

[edit]
The equation for the above graph:
Area = 4 * k * r^2 * (sin(atan(1/k)))^2
Where:
r = radius
k = aspect ratio (x/y)

If you set the radius = sqrt(0.5) = 0.707, you'll get the normalized graph where the area = 1 for a square aspect ratio.

qrk
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  • How can an aspect ratio of 2 have more area than an aspect ratio that's half of it (1)? I can't exactly picture it. 2 is like having 2 squares in front of you instead of 1 square, so wouldn't it be double the area? How does inscribing those squares in a circle reduce their absolute area – user610620 Jan 06 '22 at 23:50
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    @user610620 An aspect ratio of 2 has an area of 0.80. Aspect ratio of 1 has an area of 1.00, thus, the aspect ratio of 2 has less area than the aspect ratio of 1. Note that the image circle radius is fixed. I added the equation in the answer so you can see how this works. – qrk Jan 07 '22 at 02:23
  • @user610620 About those two squares: they have to fit in the same radius circle, thus you need to shrink them down to fit in the circle. – qrk Jan 07 '22 at 02:33
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    So the more area an art photograph has, the more aesthetic and valuable it is to consumers? – user610620 Jan 07 '22 at 06:58
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    @user610620 If a shape has more area, a greater amount of light that comes through the lens will fall on it. Any light that doesn't fall on the sensor is wasted. – Mark H Jan 07 '22 at 09:14
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    For the less mathematically inclined, here's a more visual explanation of what "inscribed in a circle" means: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aspect.ratios.optimised.png The key is that in order to fit in a circle of the same size, a 16:9 image has to be reduced in height more than it can be extended in width, which is why the intuition about it being "twice as wide" doesn't apply. – IMSoP Jan 07 '22 at 11:09
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    Why use an inscribed circle as a benchmark, when we use widescreen monitors? a 1.5 (3:2) ratio image with landscape orientation fills the space on a widescreen monitor more fully than a 1:1 image does, making it maximally efficient, and we don't view the world through one sphere, but two (two eyes, horizontal to each other) – user610620 Jan 07 '22 at 13:02
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    @user610620 because camera lenses are circular, and you want as much as possible of the focused image area from the lens represented (before cropping/postprocessing anyway). Of course, you could use a sensor larger than the image area of the lens, but then you'd end up with vignetting, etc. So those aesthetic choices are left to you, the photographer, and the manufacturer chooses to give the raw image at sensor resolution and aspect ratio. Also, here qrk is referring to not an inscribed circle, but a circumscribed circle (the rectangle is what is inscribed). – Tamoghna Chowdhury Jan 07 '22 at 14:15
  • Or basically @Orbit's answer – Tamoghna Chowdhury Jan 07 '22 at 14:16
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    Camera lense is sinularly circular. But human eyes are doubly circular. Why benchmark based on the image capturing equipment, rather than consumers' biological perception apparatus? – user610620 Jan 07 '22 at 14:22
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    @user610620 I use an aspect ratio that suits the image, not the monitor. Purely an aesthetic decision. If a camera used a 16:9 aspect, I believe I would be cropping the image often to something in the 4:3 to 3:2 aspect, except for panorama images that have been around 2:1 to 5:1. – qrk Jan 07 '22 at 17:13
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    @user610620 It's not a "benchmark", it's a practical compromise: our task is to make the best use of the light through a circular lens, while producing an image that is aesthetically satisfying. We could ignore the shape of the lens completely, and capture a rectangle with a ratio of 100:1, but the downsides of throwing away that much of the captured light are rarely worth it. Since a 3:2 ratio is quite pleasing (particularly in portrait orientation), and makes better use of the circular input, it has largely remained the standard compromise. – IMSoP Jan 07 '22 at 19:26
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    Just a quick math note, sin²(arctan(1/k) can be expressed without the trig functions as (k²+1)/k² = 1 + 1/k² – Donald Hosek Jan 08 '22 at 04:09
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    Isn't 0.96 12% more than 0.86, not just 10% more? 0.86 * 1.12 is roughly 0.96. – bdsl Jan 08 '22 at 11:10
  • Hmmm, As the attractive graph is 800 x 400, it suggests an aspect ratio closer to 16:9 is nicer than the ones closer to 1:1 - at least in this case. Supports @user610620 comment. – chux - Reinstate Monica Jan 08 '22 at 18:27
  • This answer could be improved by adding @IMSoP’s comment to it. As it is, this answer brings up more questions like, if maximizing area is important, why aren’t all photos square? – Todd Wilcox Jan 08 '22 at 21:03
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The 35mm camera evolved into an image size that is 24mm x 36mm. This format was chosen by the German camera maker E. Leitz. One of his engineers, Oskar Barnack designed a 35mm still camera in 1913. At that time, Thomas Edison was making movies using a 35mm wide film stock. This film has perforations along both edges to accommodate mechanical transport in the Cine (motion picture) camera and projector. By 1913 this film was plentiful. The Cine camera image was 18mm height 24mm wide. Leitz doubled the height to 36mm for the Lieca camera making the format 24mm height by 36mm length.

Consider that this film size is too tiny to be useful unless an enlargement is made. Now most films went to a professional photofinisher for developing and printing. It became standard practice to enlarge 35mm negatives using long rolls of 3 ½ wide paper. The result was a print size of 3 ½ X 5 1/4 inch. By the middle of the last century, 4 inch wide paper became popular thus the industry standard became a 4 x 6 inch print.

By the way, professional photographers, of this period, were mainly selling 8x10 inch portrait size prints. This size stems from the Dutch paper makers during the Industrial Revolution. Seems they automated paper making using machines that produced a web of paper the width of an operator’s outstretched arms. At that time the Dutch began to produce drawing paper 8x10 inch in tablets. This size was the most efficient cut-down of the web with reduced paper waste. The 8x10 sketch paper became most popular in England.

Meanwhile the TV industry evolved into “wide-screen” formats. The 16:9 TV format is here to stay, I think. I will bet that still cameras of future will begin using this format and it will become the "industry standard".

Alan Marcus
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    "I will bet that still cameras of future will begin using this format" - although I'd question whether 16:9 photos are as "useful" for most purposes. Yes, they are great for viewing landscape on a TV - but that's about it IMO. And 9:16 portrait doesn't look so good at all IMO. – MrWhite Jan 06 '22 at 21:23
  • We have the option to post edit i.e., cropping to any desired ratio. – Alan Marcus Jan 07 '22 at 00:29
  • Finally, the Dutch produced Blender, and the rest is history. ;-D – Mentalist Jan 07 '22 at 04:05
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    I think that switching to 16:9 for still photography would mean all lenses will become 3 to 4 times heavier and 3 to 4 times more expensive. They can easily afford that for cinema, but it doesn't work very well for still photography. – Orbit Jan 08 '22 at 12:05
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    @AlanMarcus: You can crop to any ratio from any ratio though. For any given pixel count, the best images will come from a sensor that matches the target aspect ratio. Any other ratio is losing information. If photographers were routinely using 16:9, it would be best to have cameras optimized for that. – MichaelS Jan 09 '22 at 09:28
  • @Orbit: For a given pixel count, a 16:9 sensor is only about 15.5% wider than a 4:3 sensor (assuming pixels are already as small as they can get). Even if we scale all three dimensions of the lens by that, it's only 54% heavier. That's trivial for cheap cameras with small lenses. In one case, I found a 1.7lb DSLR with a 3.5lb lens, 5.2lb total. Increasing that 54% is a 5.4lb lens, 7.1lb total, or 37% heavier. But that's a pretty heavy zoom lens. – MichaelS Jan 09 '22 at 09:46
  • @MichaelS: Isn't it 30%? 4:3=16:12 and 12 is 30% more than 9. If that's true it would mean a bit over 2 times more glass, if I scale all 3 directions. – Orbit Jan 10 '22 at 08:56
  • For the same pixel count, you're changing both axes. Starting with standard 1080p for convenience: 1920 x 1080 = 2,073,600 px. Converting to 4:3 gives HxW=1920x1080 and W=Hx4/3. That leads to HxHx4/3=1920x1080 -> H²=1920x1080x3/4 -> H = sqrt(1920x1080x3/4) = 1247 (ish). W = 1247 x 4/3 = 1663 (ish). So a 1663x1247 sensor has the same pixel count as a 1920x1080 sensor. The glass width is determined by the long axis. 1920/1663 = 1.155, or a 15.5% increase in width. If you just increase the 4:3 sensor's width to 16:9, you'll get more glass, but more pixels too. – MichaelS Jan 10 '22 at 09:06
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Aspect ratio can be anything if you're making your own cameras and coating your own plates. But if you use equipment manufactured by others, you're limited to whatever is actually made and sold. While you can crop to whatever aspect ratio you like, the full image will always be whatever is captured. Papers, frames, and other supplies are also available in standard sizes.

While there are cameras and papers that do not fit the most commonly used sizes, they hold a minority share until enough people switch. As you've noted, there's currently little market demand for manufacturers to change. So they don't.

Even if another format were to become more popular than 3:2 and 4:3, there is still pre-existing equipment that can continue to be used. There also are pre-existing images that would continue to dominate until enough new images are created.

As for why 3:2 and 4:3 are the most popular (still photo) aspect ratios...

Initially, manufacturers produced equipment and supplies that were incompatible with each other, but they eventually figured out that's a ludicrous way to compete. As time progressed, they naturally moved toward standard sizes. This has happened repeatedly with different technologies (paper, film, screens, sensors, etc).

So large format had more variety in aspect ratios. Medium format fewer. Miniature pretty much just a couple. Of course, there are always holdouts, but they hold a minority market share. (eg, square formats, panoramic formats, stereographic images, etc)

What appears to have happened (according to Wikipedia) is someone cut down a standard Kodak 70mm film stock to make the 135 format for motion pictures. Motion picture film was run vertically with a 4:3 aspect ratio (± audio track, anamorphic, etc.). Then for still cameras, someone else put two 4:3 frames together and ran the film horizontally to create the 3:2 aspect ratio. This format became popular and resisted numerous attempts at change.

By the time digital came around, 4:3 was used in consumer cameras to (probably) match the size of monitors in common use at the time. For "pro" cameras, 3:2 was (probably) used because it's what photographers expect after a century of use. There is also lots of existing equipment (paper, lenses, shutters, etc) that could be reused in the transition. (Early DSLRs were modified still cameras.)

Since there doesn't appear to be market demand for change in still photography, manufacturers have no need to change the native aspect ratio of (non-phone) cameras. However, if the demand for dedicated still photography dwindles, still photography could transition to wider native formats as more people use camcorders and phones to capture stills.

xiota
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  • This seems to indicate that photographers can publish whichever aspect ratio they want, but honestly think that the professional photography market would reject many custom aspect ratios if they did that. I'm sure media houses have a protocol for submissions received that force photographers to conform to some standard aspect ratio or image size already entrenched in the print/tabloid industry. – user610620 Jan 06 '22 at 19:17
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    Photographers are generally limited to the equipment and supplies they can purchase. For fine-art, if it's important enough, photographers can purchase custom papers, mats, frames, etc. But most will just go with a standard size. For the print industry, editors would want the full image so they can resize or crop to fit the layout. In that case, the photographer is limited to whatever the sensor provides, which is at the whim of the manufacturer. – xiota Jan 06 '22 at 20:11
  • Right, and besides physical sensors, have a feeling that, not so much frame sizes, but actual industry grade ink/laser printers, will continuously hamper the adoption of 16:9 in print photography because even word/image processing software themselves that send the signal to the printer have standard print sizes that force the physical printers to crop/trim the full image to conformity. – user610620 Jan 06 '22 at 20:47
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    @user610620 Does rolled paper change this? You usually have one fixed dimension, but can keep printing on the roll for essentially as long as you want. – James Moore Jan 07 '22 at 20:46
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    @user610620: I don't understand your comment about printers being forced to crop or trim images to conformity. Word lets me specify custom print sizes and Windows lets me add custom sizes directly to the printer driver's list of sizes so other software can print non-standard sizes, like Paint.NET. If I have the oddball paper, I can print to it as long as it fits in the printer's input. Standard legal is 8.5" x 14", while 16:9 would be 8.5" x 15.11". Hardly enough difference to break my feed tray. Conversely, standard letter is 8.5" x 11", which can be trimmed to 6.19" x 11" and fit in my tray. – MichaelS Jan 09 '22 at 13:22
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    @MichaelS you could crop that 8.5" x 14" to 7.9" x 14" and not have to modify your paper tray at all. – Mark Ransom Jan 12 '22 at 22:23
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One thing that I want to point out is the APS film format (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Photo_System) did use a native 16:9 aspect ratio. From what I understand about the system the other two aspect ratios "C" (classic) and "P" (panoramic) work by cropping and storing some information in the magnetic portion of the film so that it can be cropped correctly when printed.

The native format "H" (High Definition) has a 16:9 aspect ratio.

The Movie Man
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