Why aren't pictures round?

[hamlet]

I'm wondering why we use round lenses to record an image onto a rectangular surface? I mean isn't that just a huge waste of resources and needless weight added onto the lens? Why not have rectangular lenses? What do you think about this?

 

[D-B-J]

This was hashed out in an older thread. Things like simplicity of making them is one reason, I think.

 

[unpopular]

Yeah, I agree. It probably has to do with cutting paper and not wanting to see a vignette as our eyes do not vignette under normal circumstances.

 

[Light Guru]

I'm wondering why we use round lenses to record an image onto a rectangular surface? I mean isn't that just a huge waste of resources and needless weight added onto the lens? Why not have rectangular lenses? What do you think about this?

Because designing and building rectangular lenses is would be more expensive then designing and building round lenses.

 

[slackercruster]

OP, I do a lot with round pix. At least I started a few months ago. I like em.

 

[Ysarex]

Of course, because frames aren't round.

Joe

 

[snowbear]

Since the sensors and film are smaller than the actual image projected onto them by the lens, I'd say resources used (plastic, emulsion, silicon, etc.) are less. Of course if you use a DX lens on 35mm or larger format film, then you're wasting resources.

 

[hamlet]

Yeah, I agree. It probably has to do with cutting paper and not wanting to see a vignette as our eyes do not vignette under normal circumstances.

See we don't really know that because each human brain is equipped with an internal lightroom. There's actually like a huge blindspot in your eyes.

 

[W.Y.Photo]

Because film was expensive until 1990 and wasting half of the area of the film is a waste while light is free.

If you look at old daguerreotypes, images were typically round due to the extreme vignetting created by the far less sensitive silver compounds placed on metal that were traditionally used in the 1800's

 

[astroNikon]

The world ran out of round film.

 

[unpopular]

Even if the lens was square, would the image be also? I don't really think this is the case is it?

 

[480sparky]

Film and paper are sheet goods. It's much more economical to make squares and rectangles out of them than it is to make a bunch of circles and waste the material between the circles. When digital came along, we were using rectangular screens to view them with, so they naturally retained the four-cornered image.

This, and photography fell in line right behind painting.... which usually used a square or rectangular canvas.

 

[astroNikon]

the shape of the lens does not matter.
What matters is how all the internal lenses were designed to transmit and project the image at the inside end.
but I would think designing a square lens would require larger round lenses, which then had to be cut down to a rectangular shape.
Thus adding more steps and costs to the process.

Plus, think of how your zoom and focus. This would change the shape of a rectangular lens to square, which would add more material and weight. But to optimally make the entire lens functionally better the lens would have to be even larger, with more weight to the glass.
And you'd probably end up with a round set of lens elements sooner or later just from design and manufacturing efficiencies.

 

[W.Y.Photo]

Plus, as an aperture almost always (unless very small) needs to be round to produce an image the only function the square lens would play would be cropping a projected image that would naturally be round in the first place.

^correct me if I'm wrong. Its been 4 years since I've studied this stuff.

 

[CAP]

• Rectangle lenses would provide lens barrels that would be difficult to focus. Imagine turning a rectangle, focusing ring not, to mention attaching rectangle filters.
• Finding picture frames would become interesting, now we’d have different circumference size frames.
• There would be tons of paper waste because paper is in a rectangular format, so round prints would create a non-green environment.
• Round computer monitors to view photos doesn’t make sense.
• It becomes difficult to properly align round images in frames and hang them properly, exactly the way they were captured.
• If video adopted round formats, tubeless televisions today but appear as one large tube.
• Our smart phones would become round to view the images properly too. Now can you imagine round Instagram photos instead of their current square format? Even worse, if you dropped your phone can you picture it rolling down hill?
• Billboards would become round adding a tunnel vision perception.
• If theater screens were round would we be sitting in tunnels viewing movies instead of rectangular theater rooms? Can you imagine the acoustics alone?
• The Rule of Thirds would require a revision.