Square Sensor

[Paris Remillard]

If the future Red sensors don't have global read-out, as opposed to the current rolling shutters, it would be great to have a square sensor like in the Phantom HD so that if you have fast horizontal panning or fast horizontal motion, you could turn the camera on it's side. The camera being on it's side would eliminate skew, and the sensor being square would allow you to still have the full format width. It's possible with the Red One to turn the camera sideways to eliminate skew, or I should say trade it for the less noticeable compression/expansion, but you are then limited to the highest vertical resolution as your new horizontal resolution, currently 2301 pixels. Just a thought.

[Corrado Silveri]

And you can make horizontal and vertical still pictures in the same shot... You don't need to rotate the body. And you can choose the right crop in post.

Just my 2

[fde101]

Or you could take square pictures.

[Mitch Gross]

The Phantom HD's square sensor gives some other nifty advantages, like room to recrop in post or full capture of the entire circle of a Nikon 6mm or 8mm fisheye (the Peleng too).

[E.J. Sadler]

I've always loved the flexibility of square image areas. It would be nice if instead of always cropping in post, you had the option of only storing the in camera/viewfinder crop to save storage space. Since the RED already does this for it's formats it would make sense. But it would also be nice to store the entire square image with the viewfinder crop as metadata that could automatically be used in Lightroom.

[Alan Fletcher]

The full image circle should be captured in raw, so that you can crop to any desired rectangle and also capture a circular fisheye image.

The EVF could show the currently selected rectangular crop to guide in composition. (if raw+jpg is used, the jpg would be cropped, too)

The chip itself would probably be square -- the corners easily accommodate 4 readout buffers, possibly with diagonal busses into the circle.

One advantage of this for sloppy (or over-your-head) shooters is that you don't have to hold the camera perfectly level.

[Corrado Silveri]

Seems that this could be a good idea for a revolutionary DSLR camera...
Any comment from RED?

[Jared Caldwell]

Well, if this camera is fitted with a Monstro sensor, then skew "shouldn't" be an issue (at least, not any more that any other sensor type or film). Jim said in an earlier thread that the read/reset times of Monstro would close the gap for CMOS sensors.