Panasonic hidden sensor area - what is it used for?

What do you think is the use of the right sensor area?

Raw file https://raw.pixls.us/getfile.php/1959/nice/Panasonic%20-%20DMC-G7%20-%204:3.RW2
In darktable, click passthrough in the hamburger menu in raw black/white point.

I started seeing this recently. Seems to be a bug (wrong crop). I don’t get it on all images, ‘Intelligent Zoom’ seems to be the root cause.

See

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Thanks! So rawspeed bug and not something in the raw file.

It is something real (junk?) in the raw file (not exclusive to Panasonic, some other formats can have it as well, hence the crop definition). It is not a RawSpeed “bug” per se (until someone figures out how to deal w/ those digital zoom files, which seems to be affecting some Panasonics as far as known). You get the same “junk” if you read w/ e.g. LibRaw’s unprocessed_raw tool
 To me it looks like some data repetition from aliased pixel column addresses on the same line when reading out the sensor which needs to have a rounded up number of transfers in a burst mode


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My Canon G16 sometimes shows more on the edge of the frame which is slightly darker than the rest of the image. I just presume DT shows more of the sensor than other programs and have designed a custom crop pre-set for when this happens.

image

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I don’t know about other programs, but you can get the Lens correction module to show you a bit of extra (just use the scale slider). This is occasionally useful for me when I find that I missed something on the edge when composing, especially when combined with another geometry.

Never seen that before with a Canon.
https://raw.pixls.us/getfile.php/1114/nice/Canon%20-%20PowerShot%20G16%20-%20RAW%20(4:3).CR2