Sometimes Rockwell is really funny

[unpopular]

I don't really get this thread.

Thats because there is not much to get. I was just making fun of the fact that some people still use some ancient non-ISO non-metric measurements and believe the rest of the world would understand them. Well, I dont. Not without asking Google, anyway.[/QUOTE]

While I agree that the imperial system is idiotic, there has to be some technical reason why consistently "inch" format sensors are half the diagonal of their stated camera tube ancestor's diameter. Even if they are counting on the outside diameter, this does not explain everything. While the camera tube sleeve provides some optical interference, it's not THAT much.

 

[Bebulamar]

Quote from Wikipedia
"Sensor size are expressed in inches notation because at the time of the popularization of digital image sensors they were used to replace video camera tubes. The common 1" circular video camera tubes had a rectangular photo sensitive area about 16mm diagonal, so a digital sensor with a 16 mm diagonal size was a 1" video tube equivalent. The name of a 1" digital sensor should more accurately be read as "one inch video camera tube equivalent" sensor."
So really it's not funny