Originally posted by photoptimist A tilting sensor for a DSLR could be built to tilt away from shutter, mirror, and lens. This would tilt the plane of focus closer to the camera.
Yes, that would be possible, but somewhat complicated, and you'd lose the ability to focus to infinity with anything but the sensor's edges.
That's somewhat different to what optical bench cameras do. When they tilt the sensor (film, that is), they rotate it around a horizontal or vertical axis that runs through the sensor's centre, thus moving one half of the sensor back from the lens but the other half toward it. The axis of rotaion of the sensor remains in the focal plane.
Your concept would mean a rotation around one of the edges, thus moving the whole sensor back and only the edge around which the sensor is being rotated remaining in focal plane.
Interesting as the idea is, I'm afraid it would be somewhat complicated to achieve, because you'd have to implement four separate axes of rotation (lower/upper edge and left/right edge, though but one of each pair would be used for obvious reasons). That would add to the camera's depth, because all of this would have to happen behind the current plane of movement for the sensor (towards the photographer), thus making the camera even deeper (or fatter) than the K-1 already is.
But having the sensor tilt through the focal plane shutter would also be highly complicated and critical, beginning that the aperture of the shutter would have to be much larger than the usual 24x36mm to accomodate the sensor's outer dimensions ...
That doesn't seem feasible either.
Another approach would be tilting the combined shutter/sensor assembly, here the severest constraint would be the mirror's mechanics which would impede the sensors upper edges' movement towards the lens. That problem might be solved by increasing the dimensions of the mirror box. With such a construction, I doubt that it would be possible to use the tilt mechanism for image stabilization (due to the severely increased mass by adding the shutter) and ... I'm afraid that the resulting camera would be somewhat in the dimensions of the Pentax 67. Good to throw at a stampeding elephant herd ...
Maybe sensor tilt would be something where those evil mirrorless cameras are definitively at an advantage.
Until then, I just use my Samyang 24TS.