What innovative, unconventional cartridge designs can you recommend?

@lewm 

the amount of capacitance "needed" to smoothe out rectified AC voltage into DC voltage is inversely proportional to the final DC voltage that is delivered to the circuit

You are strictly correct, you did not post a formula in full. I took what you wrote to be the same thing as a formula, where the constant of proportionality is not specified.

Unfortunately, it is far from the full story because the more capacitance you add for a given final voltage, the lower the ripple.

Thinking about reducing ripple, I wondered about using a Class A amplifier being fed a constant signal.  The output should be constant voltage, whatever the load.  An over-the-top-solution maybe, but then I remembered that Wilson Benesch use three Class A amplifiers, one for each phase, to power their megabuck direct drive turntable.

@audphile1 

The Hana should have one advantage - straight lines for setting it up!

The only flat surfaces on the DS003 are the top and the back, so there is really only one decent straight line, which makes azimuth and zenith hard to set mechanically 

Even the front LED has curved sides and the whole thing curves under like the prow of a boat

@richardbrand  yep

I’ve been using Dr. Feichert protractor to set up cartridges. My VPI table comes with a good metal protractor that secures at the arm base as well. 
But…if you think the DS003 was a pain setting up because of its shape, I guarantee you I got you beat with the VPI counterweight on the unipivot arm.
That is a royal pain in the a$$ as it’s not only not treaded it’s also bottom heavy because VPI thought it would add flexibility and make it not only a counterweight but azimuth adjustment as well. So to keep me from losing my mind, a Soundsmith Counter intuitive was part of my order. Hopefully it will minimize the amount of bourbon that will be required post install. 

In rereading the Umami Blue review in TAS and Tom’s comparison of it with DS003, I think the below note must be taken into consideration…

Also on hand, we have a J Sikora Initial Max turntable with their Kevlar Unipivot tone arm.

That’s where I have the DS Audio cartridge that I referred to.
 

How much of a difference he described between the two cartridges be attributed to the table/arm combinations? But in any case, I agree with his description of the Blue based on what I heard myself with that cartridge. Hopefully in my system with my Whest phono stage it will not overstep the boundaries and cross into analytical territory. 

@richardbrand 

Are there Moving Iron designs other than Decca and its direct derivatives worth considering?  Serious question.

Absolutely! Four of my six mounted cartridges are MI, and only one is a Decca. Decca (by derivatives you will have to mean London Decca as there are no others) is a special case as it uses a design not in use by any others today. There was an Ikeda MC version, and the Neumann DST MC, but they are long gone. There are three current manufacturers of MI cartridges of non-Decca design, all resemble MM cartridges except that they have a ferromagnetic alloy on the proximal end of the cantilever and fixed magnets and coils in the body of the cartridge. This means the cantilever assembly can be lighter and more responsive. The oldest manufacturer is Grado, but Soundsmith and Nagaoka also make similar designs. Grado cartridges use a tiny disk as the ferrous metal on the cantilever, I'm not sure of the shape of that used by SS or Nagaoka. Both Grado and SS claim to make the lightest moving mass of any cartridge. Goldring do not currently make an MI cartridge and in the past Stanton and Empire among others made similar designs. Decca and Nagaoka are high output (5 and 3mV respectively), Grado are in the middle at 1mV (so you can use an MM input with sufficient gain, or an MC input), and Soundsmith make both low (0.4mV) and high (2.12mV) output cartridges. Peter Ledermann has hinted that he only makes the low output versions so that people can use their fancy MC phono stages, but it is true that his most expensive cartridges are all low output.

The top models from Soundsmith and Grado can give a high end MC cartridge serious competition. Nagaokas compare well with very good MM cartridges and are relatively cheap. Deccas, well, they are in a class of their own. Quirky, but once you have heard one, you may be hooked for life.