Geoff D F wrote:
We've been left with a lot of marketing terminology to describe the different formats. Somewhere along the line, 35mm digital became "full frame". Those that don't favour APS-c sometimes refer to that format as being crop cameras. In an own goal, Olympus and Panasonic came up with "micro 4/3", despite consumers having irrational insecurities about sensor size. And then there are 1 inch sensors which are nothing like 1 inch in any dimension.
“35mm “doesn’t actually make sense with digital since there is nothing about it that is 35mm. As you know, the name came from the width of the sprocketed film stock used for movies. (This is similar to the “6” in 645 which refers to the 6cm width of the film, on which a smaller image is recorded.) There’s not really any confusion now about the term “full frame” after more than two decades of its use to describe the roughly 24mm x 36mm image area.
APS-C is more confusing since it can refer to more than one set of dimensions — the 1.5x crop used by most brands and the 1.6x crop used by Canon, for example. Sigh.
MFT is probably the best case since it does refer to a standard size and format these days.
But various parties have long been kind of loose with their use of the terms. Two examples:
1. When Pentax came out with their revolutionary 33x44 camera fifteen years ago, they called the camera the “645d” and then called its successor the “645z.” That was extremely misleading since there was already an actual 645 format (image with long dimension crosswise on 6cm film) that photographers were long familiar with. Honestly, it seemed intentional misleading.
(To me, something that is more problematic than coming up with a new term for new digital formats — full frame and micro four thirds, for example — is reusing old terms with accepted meanings in ways that make no logical sense… like Pentax using the “645” terminology.”)
2. Then there’s Fujifilm, who have referred to their 33x44 sensor systems as medium format and large format and maybe by other terms. I think Leica or someone may have referred to it (or a related 3:2 aspect ratio version) as super-full-frame! (Of the three, I think that actually makes some sense.)
I'm sure Dan does it either to be disparaging to 44x33 users or as a flex to 'educate' that digital MF is smaller than any of the 120 film formats - something I'm sure every user knows.
It isn’t disparaging, and I’m mystified why you take it to be disparaging. The miniMF sensors are excellent and have advantages over the smaller FF sensors. It is simply an accurate way to refer to the 33x44 format, which lies midway between full frame and 645, the smallest traditional film medium format. I’ve called it this since I first knew about and saw the original Pentax 645d 15 years ago.
Things would be simpler if we could just refer to formats using numbers based on their approximate dimensions, I suppose: 13x17, 15x23, 24x36, 33x44, etc. (We’d probably say “thirteen-seventeen,” up through “thirty-three-forty-four.”
But that’s not gonna happen. We’re stuck with the idiomatic terms that have evolved over time.