I think its fair to say that, if I was talking about my sensor and said,"my 43.3 mm sensor is fantastic" no one apart from you Jim" would know I was on about the diagonal measurement of a FF 36x24 sensor. A diagonal measurement also fails to inform us of the aspect ratio, a very important piece of information for most photographers.
There is no point in changing the "metric" unless it improves our understanding of the information.
I think it is reasonable to talk about "the area" of a sensor as it is this area we try to fill when taking a photograph.
Back in the day, when talk of exposure was the important topic, fields with rain falling on them and how bigger fields collected more rain and if rain was photons it means a bigger sensor collects more photons and more photons mean more light and more light means...............
I assume those MF fields collected 70% more rain than those little FF fields.
I can see a diiference if I compare my Hasselblad shot photograph with my FF leica or Canon or my APS-c Fuji XT-5. That is good enough for me. 70%. 28% better, no idea. It just doesn't matter.
When digital photography took off the camera manufacturers were constrained and impeded by the thought that we, the enthusiast photographers, owned lenses which would need to be usable with the digital sensor. This meant the 24x36mm, 35mm, miniature film size, now known as "full frame", became the benchmark size.
The attempt by some manufacturers to re-introduce a medium format digital sensor should be applauded and 44x33mm seems to have become the accepted benchmark for MF. Its increase in size,over and above FF, is irrelevant its benifets are visually apparent.
Maybe we should dump FF and introduce a 33x25mm sensor as the next size down. Then we can say, “twice as big”.
If you were selling floor space I would bet a room 43ft by 33ft would cost approx 70% more than one 36ft by 24 ft..
Possibly true, but not relevant here. We're not talking about the cost to manufacture a sensor.
A Hasselblad sensor is bigger than a full frame sensor,
That is not in question.
does it really matter what facts we bend to define this?
Are you saying that metrics don't matter? I've seen projects fail completely because the wrong metric was optimized.
It doesn’t matter. We all agree the larger sensor provides the means to produce a better photograph and this is not changed by deciding or changing which size measurement is used.
But the difference in size is important. Would a 37x25mm sensor provide a meaningful advantage over a FF one? I think not. Using the right size metrics, many of the improvements can be quantified.
