TENOG wrote:
Another question: Is there any advantage to using the in-camera crop over just cropping the image to the same dimensions during post processing?
It depends. If you can “see” the crop without the assistance of the camera, then no. Or if you usualy prefer the “normal” (for the camera) 3:2 aspect ratio and only occasionally crop, or if your approach is to capture a larger area than what you think you’ll end up using, then probably no. (That latter approach is very common among photographers, who prefer to reserve final, thoughtful decisions about cropping for the post-processing stage.)
It seems to me that if you are typically using a wide variety of crops from shot to shot that switching cropping mode every time could end up adding a disruptive step, unless you perhaps always work very slowly.
If you always prefer a non-3:2 aspect ratio it makes sense to set your preferred ratio as our default in many cases. (I do that with one of my cameras, the one I use for landscape photography. My default preference there is a 4:3 aspect ratio. But I also make landscape images with other ratios, such as 16:9… and I don’t bother to change the display aspect ratio when I do since I can easily visualize it.)
Photographers have long managed to adapt a single aspect ratio camera to the possibility of post-processing crops without needing the camera to show the crops at the time of exposure.