Trev
The Dumb One
It's totally irrelevant to the discussion in hand, because whether the pixels are real or 'phoney', Sony will use the same 'fiddle factor' for the various aspect ratios. And using those 'fiddled or not' pixel counts, it is fairly obvious that my camera and my phone both have 4:3 sensors. As a matter of fact, although it's not relevant I have a Sony DCS-HX9-V with a claimed pixel count of 18.2M. My phone is a Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge who claim "The camera on Galaxy S7 and S7 edge features a DSLR-grade 12MP Dual Pixel Sensor for crisp, clear and bright pictures under any circumstances." Tell us the pixel count on your super duper camera when using different aspect ratio.Do you have an α6000 or similar, then? I have the α5100 and α6000 bodies, with a variety of lenses.
That is absolute bollox. They already do by their millions if they change aspect ratio from the 'norm'. If the manufacturers don't make it too obvious what's going on (which they wouldn't) the average user would be in total ignorance.BH, you will never persuade anyone to buy a phone where the image or video is constantly cropped! Fact!
I suspect that the majority of phone users have absolutely no idea of what's going on with their cameras. You can tell that as they are stupid enough to take video in portrait.
Quite honestly, I don't give a shit and suspect neither do the majority of phone snappers as long as the snap is of acceptable quality for their use. The majority of people have no desire to enlarge their snaps to A0 size or crop out a tiny portion of the overall pic.The camera pixels are real ones, whereas phone "pixels" are phoney. A phone sensor is so tiny, it can't get anywhere near those resolutions.
Using BH's idea, the horizontal resolution would drop from (say) 4,000 pixels to 3,000, but the 'letterbox effect' that they would have on their display screen would no doubt encourage most of them to rotate the phone to landscape mode, thus reinstating the 4,000 pixel horizontal resolution.