How Many Megapixels Is 35mm Film?

[@TeddyCavachon]

Back in 1974-77 I worked in the Photomechanical Lab at National Geographic where we did the photographic production steps for the NGS maps, halftones and color separations for offset printing. I moved on into printing management for a commercial magazine printer then joined the US Foreign Service spending 28 years managing its overseas and domestic publication production, converting it from analog to digital methods. Because printing presses and ink jet printers reproduce continuous tone images from film by breaking into a pattern of variable sized dots. Color images are reproduced with a pattern of dots printed with transparent Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black dots in a rosette pattern with a spacing of 133-150 dots per inch which is the resolution at which the human eye at 18” reading distance will perceive the image as continuous tone similar to the original silver and dye based photographic medium. Thus 133 or 150 dots per inch or DPI because the industry standard for offset printing. Trying to space the dots closer together resulted in them spreading together in the darker areas which causes a loss in shadow detail. Because paper is darker than projected light light it is also necessary to adjust the contrast of the midtones when reproducing a photograph to compensate. When B&W laser printers were invented there needed to be a way to create different dot sizes and each dot spaced 1/150th inch apart actually consisted of a 10x10 grid of smaller dots the laser printer would fuse toner into creating a 100 step gradient of tone on a laser printed B&W photo which to the human eye and brain looked continuous tone. There was a 2:1 oversampling rate between digital pixels and laser printing dots which is where the 300 PPI or Pixels per Inch standard for digital reproduction of continuous tone photos. Using that 300ppi rule of thumb is is easy to calculate how large a print can be made from a digital file and have it perceived in the same way as the photographic original or in the case of digital cameras the perception of the original scene by eye. With regard to 35mm film, color negative film is used to make prints and that involves optically enlarging the image which results in a loss of image quality as the size of the reproduction increases. A 16x20 print from a 35mm negative will not look as sharp and detailed as a 4x6 print. This is where the number of pixels in a digital sensor comes into play. The first digital camera I used was an .8 MP Apple QuickTake 100 in 1994 I bought for work to replace Polaroids used to document shipping damage making it possible to e-mail the photos. I was in the Philippines managing the USIA Publication Center in Manila at the time and was also running one of the earliest web servers on the Internet at the time (there were only about 5,000 active then) so I edited photos of traditional Christmas decoration I took on bike ride in Photoshop and published them on a web page on Internet: super.nova.org/pasko keeping the file sizes small because there was so little bandwidth-the entire network in the Philippines at the time was connected to the Internet via a 56Kbps bandwidth on a fiber cable running across the Pacific to California which had been activated just months earlier in March 1994. I waited until 2000 to purchase my own digital waiting for the resolution to react 1200 x 1800 pixels which I knew based on my reproduction experience would produce a 4” x 6” print that would look every bit as good or better than a 4x6 from a 35mm negative. I didn’t use an ink jet printer to make my prints I used a $25k 3M Rainbow Dye Sublimation printer we used at work for proofing color separations made from film transparencies. Instead of ink it used rolls of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and black film which were fused into the paper similar to how a B&W laser printer works. The 4x6 prints produce that way were better looking than prints because there were no optics involved in making the print and I was quite skilled at editing and sharpen images in Photoshop by then. The camera was a 2.1 MP Kodak DC290 with a 3x zoom lens and I was able to make 12 x18 inch prints, the largest the 3M Rainbow could produce which were were as good as as any similar size prints I had made from 35mm. Some of them still hang on my walls 23 years later. From that point on the number of MP the camera had just determined how big of an “on par with 35mm” print I could make. Knowing that camera sensor size were going to increase rapidly I decided to wait for prosumer level 8MP camera by Nikon and Canon before spending for a DSLR and new lenses and for that reason in 2001 purchased a 5MP Minolta D7Hi and produced better than film 12x18 Dye Sub and letter size inkjet prints on an HP 8/C photo printer I bought for on clearance at Costco for $125 to print at home. I’d been a Nikon user since 1968 and owned a NikonosII and NikonosV underwater cameras and a pair of Nikon F bodies and lenses but in 2004 opted for a Canon 8MP 20D because Canon had invested in fabbing its own CMOS sensor but Nikon was using inferior CCD technology sourced from Nikon and Canon appeared at that point to be the better long term investment. In addition to the 20D body I bought Canons 10-22mm, 24-70 2.8 L, 70-200mm 2.8 L and two 580ex flashes. I upgraded to a 10-bit 15MP 50D body in 2008 and still use in 2024 it because with the skills I have in post processing images 15MP is more than adequate for sharing images via KZbin slide shows on my channel and displaying them on my 4K 65” Sony TV with far better IQ than from a print that size 😊 I did finally upgrade to a pair of 24MP R6mkII bodies this year because I wanted to shoot birds in flight and other wildlife, the AF and AE is so much on the mirrorless bodies and needed to invest in longer lenses. But all of my circa 2004 canon lenses still work and produce more than adequate results on the R6mkII using the EF-RF adapter. I have a regular adapter and a second with VND I used when shooting video, eliminating the need to buy expensive lens end ND filters.

[@SensibleChuckle]

Much respect. I stopped the video about 10 seconds into it just to read this post. You got a thumbs up from me.

[@Yoshua-Robinson]

@@TeddyCavachon thanks for the superb explanation

[@mikereilly2745]

I used a Kodak dc290 for astrophotography way back in ? 1999 ash...well, when it came out. I took the camera apart, removed the lens assembly , added a 4 ft long remote trigger . Made beautiful 8x10 prints of Saturn, Jupiter, the moons surface . I interfaced it to many different telescopes/eyepiece combinations . fond memories , The hard days of digital astro.

[@TeddyCavachon]

@@mikereilly2745 Interesting… I discovered the sensor did not have a UV block filter because when used my Vivitar external flash any blue fabric or plastic with UV sensitive brighteners were rendered cyan but flash shots with built in flash were normal. I then noticed the flash had a yellow cast to in and concluded Kodak put a UV filter over the flash instead of the sensor. 😂 I just got some UV filtering gels for the flashes. The lens on it was quite sharp with very little chromatic aberration.

[@mikereilly2745]

@@TeddyCavachon Hi, Back then, I worked at Wolf camera, I owned about 15 different cams all taken apart / altered for astro purposes, some I would remove the ir and or uv , some had them on a motorized (Nikon) for example , lever that moved the filter out of the path. Sony too. so you could shoot in IR with a IR filter on your lens. IR pass , block all others. most people never knew their camera could do it. If..I remember right..the dc290 had a thick blue colored ir cut filter that was very easy to remove ? been quite a while.

[@rslootweg2]

I am a professional photographer and used to work as a technical editor at FOTO magazine in the Netherlands in the old days. I tested films, camera's and lenses. Three things to add: - at 8 mp already prints were amazing compared to analogue film because the surfaces in the pictures were "closed", no black spots at a close look from the grain -it is very important to take the ISO in consideration: at the time I tested the first Konica 35 mm 3200 film which was exceptional, but it had a lot of grain and solution was (very) low. The performance of the camera with the best sensor today, the Sony A7Riii, would have been regarded a miracle in those days - I wrote a book about the Zonesystem for black and white, following the achievements of Ansel Adams. The standard range consists of 11 zones and it really needs a lot of tweaking and "soft printpaper" to get to 15 zones, which is easy achievable today. I conclude that digital photography brought us an extra camera size, e.g. we easily do medium format now at 35mm size.

[@nickadams1051]

Absolutely!

[@ditto1958]

As a matter of fact, I used to have a nice printer, and I would print 8.5 x 11 inch photos from my 8mp Olympus E-300, and they were very nice. In film days, I’d get 8 x 10 or 11 x 14 prints made from Kodachrome 64 and Ektachrome 100. They were nice, but my E-300 prints were even better.

[@timmotz2827]

I agree. Past a certain point, megapixels are irrelevant. I spent some time managing photo rights and reproductions for a major art museum. The standard for publication at that time was a print 8x10 inches at 300dpi. At that size, a 300dpi digital print would be indistinguishable at normal viewing distances from one produced by film. An 8 mp camera will produce that. When you go above 8 mp it allows you to produce larger prints at 300dpi, but a 16mp camera allows an 11x16 inch 300dpi print and most people don’t need to print larger that. Greater megapixel ratings do allow for cropping, but then it becomes a decision where your money is better spent: higher megapixels ratings or larger and sharper lenses. Or perhaps learning to frame your shot carefully in the first place. Also, when comparing digital to film you need to ask, which film? Casual photographers using digital cameras today don’t know that film was rated by ISO and what that meant: a higher number allowed for photos to be taken in lower light but produced images with larger grain. A lower ISO needed more light to produce an acceptable photo but would have a greater tonal range (a less contrasty image). The standard for photography in my field was an ISO of 50, to produce photos in a studio setting with acceptable grain and even tonal range. On my own in museum galleries I usually needed film of ISO 800 to get a usable image, but it would have obvious grain when projected for lectures and would have a lot of contrast. A good prosumer camera today (even one in the micro four thirds format) capturing in RAW format can easily go as high as ISO 1600 without a disturbing level of noise, which is the digital equivalent of grain. I use micro four thirds cameras today and enjoy the smaller size that still allows me to capture quite usable images at up to 20 mp. I have been tempted by the Lumix GH6, which can capture 100mp images, but I have to ask myself what I really need a camera like that for?

[@artberry]

I agree. In practice I think 8 to 8.6MP is a realistic equivalent because that's the point where a full frame digital camera can capture the full optical resolution most lenses can achieve under ideal circumstances. So the resolution of the medium i.e. film or digital beyond that is kind of academic. And more relevant to things like printing or screen display than actual optical image quality. I also agree due to the lack of grain and halation a full-frame digital sensor can produce results easily equivalent to medium format film and beyond. In fact I even see this with my APS-C DSLR and am often amazed by what it can achieve compared to my past experience of 35mm film. Sometimes images are more reminiscent of large format such as 5x4 and amaze me really.

[@Goldsteinphoto]

@@artberry I use a 42mp ff camera with the current model Canon 24mm tse lens for architectural photography. It sure gets more detail out of that lens than my older 22mp and 11mp cameras achieved. Moody photos on an overcast day may work great with very low resolution. So the subject and application of the images is an important factor.

[@barnseyb6031]

When I was a kid in the 60s we had a viewer to look at slides. To me, as a kid, this was a similar experience to looking at a digital photo on a modern phone. I used to love the way the pictures lit up and spung into life as you pushed the slides down into the viewer.

[@Pozi_Drive]

You should have seen viewmaster images.

[@John_Pither]

@barnseyb6031, I so get what you mean about the slides springing to life. My dad had a projector - watching the slideshows he put on was like going to the movies. Even though I was young kid, I still remember many of the stories that accompanied those slides and so now can use them as a basis for captioning when occasionally go back and digitize my folks' slides. I just wish they (and my grandparents) had kept better notes. At least dates…!

[@fiddleandfart]

Yes, I remember the particularly magic experience of seeing slides in a handheld viewer - and the way those images looked almost 3D! A quality that actually projecting them never seemed to match. Interesting!

[@TheEudaemonicPlague]

I was too poor to buy anything more than cheap film (didn't have slides anyway), but I did have a Viewmaster...that's pretty much the same thing, only stereovision. Only had a handful of discs, though. I think I still have it somewhere....

[@John_Pither]

@@TheEudaemonicPlague, the one with the 3D dinosaurs was one of my favorites. Better than all those boring "travel" ones. ;)

[@peterallen2904]

I have worked as an amateur and professional photographer for many years. When I was using film I shot in 35mm, medium and large format. As much as I loved working in film , the simplicity of digital is, for me, much better. I have, for years, shot church interiors. With film I used low film speed for a better image and had to use a long exposure . Anything over 400 Asa was grainy as hell. Now, I can hand hold my camera, hike up the iso and still have little noise. When shooting industrial interiors that had different light temperatures it was necessary to use filters for colour balance. Now, with Digital I can shoot and edit it in post production. Easy peasy, comparatively! I guess many new photographers have not the faintest idea what I’m talking about. A good video, nevertheless.

[@dougmacmillan1712]

I was a full time pro for many years, doing mostly commercial and industrial photography. When I attended Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, we were not allowed to turn in work shot with "miniature" format, 35mm. Shooting and darkroom technique has to be much better for 35mm. The only time I shot 35mm was for transparencies for photos that would be used in publication. I got tons of architectural work because I was the only photographer in town who had a 4x5 and the skill to use it properly. My workhorse portrait camera was a Mamiya RB67. I agree, many new photographers don't have the slightest idea what we're talking about. I actually used the Zone System often for both personal and professional work, mixing up D23 from scratch and using water bath development of my sheet film. I can do things in Photoshop I'd couldn't have ever done with film. The problem is the technical bar for doing professional work has been significantly lowered. It's a two-edged sword. I left photography to get a BS in Computer Science and have spent more time in that profession than I did in photography. Competition is fierce and I don't know of a full time professional photographer in my area who is making a decent living, while my computer skill set is in high demand.

[@brugj03]

That`s right, digital is so much better and more natural. Analog is a low detail grain fest. It was and still is.

[@gradywilson9213]

​@@dougmacmillan1712I was a staff photographer at the Miami Herald now in my 70 s, and retired. Film photographer required skill, knowledge, and a little bit of dumb luck. Digital makes a photographer out of anybody, my grandson who doesn't know the difference between an F-stop, and shutter speed takes some shots, then manipulate them with apps, I would have killed for years ago, he does have an eye. I was also a practitioner of Ansel Adam's Zone system, the many hours I spent in my darkroom were some of the best of my life, I just loved it. Making a living as a photographer has always been difficult. I once knew a relatively successful pro who was one of the most miserable human beings I have ever met. He didn't take days off, or vacations the moment he wasn't available others will move in after his accounts. There was always some young person willing to do the job for half the price, even free just to brake into the business. A.I will put the final nail in photography's coffin. Alfred Eisenstaed said "no matter how advanced the camera gets you'll always need the eye" with A.I that's no longer true.

[@andreasbracke1997]

With respect, did you ever use the fuji1600-c41 film. Its amazing, how sharp pics i got from my pro-photographer at his scans. Nevertheless, of course you are right in most of the time the high asa-films did not work fine. But the ilford3200-bw shot at 1600: great pics. Very usable up to 20x30cm puctures. (Regarding 35mm film). And i hate my nikon d800e above 1600iso. Dont like the pics. Unfortunately, taking film photos has grown quite expensive. Yours, andreas

[@knife-wieldingspidergod5059]

The simplicity and the convenience of modern digital cameras have made taking a picture effortless, therefore rendered its image meaningless.

[@benmcreynolds8581]

I'll never not be mind blown by the thought of how someone could have figured out how to make the chemical film camera process to work before anyone knew about it in the world.. It seems like such a obscure & tricky process to invent and how to fine tune it overtime in the early days

[@chadperling2766]

1978 was my introduction to Friday Night Lights as the rookie 'shooter' for the San Angelo Standard-Times newspaper. I was sent to Odessa to shoot the S.A. Bobcats v Permian Panthers (Mojo). Game time was 7:30 pm, deadline to turn in photo to the sports desk was 11. Drive time was about 2:15, film processing about 30 minutes, printing time 15 min which would leave me about 30 minutes to shoot the game. Camera was a Nikon FM with a Nikkor 180mm f2.8 and no motor drive, unless you count my thumb, film was Kodak Tri-X 400 ASA, PUSHED to 3200. To give me more shooting time I decided to process the film in the car during the drive time, that gave me an additional 20 minutes to shoot. I used two 36 exposure roles of film, loaded the film in the car using a changing bag, scissors, can opener and stainless steel reels/can. With one hand on the steering wheel and one in the tub I started the drive. Developer was diluted Kodak HC-110 B with extended processing time, rapid fix and hypo clearing agent (no rinses). Two hours later I walked into the darkroom shoved the film into the power washer, followed by foto-flo, heat dry, and began to print. Beat the two old pros who shot in-town games and got the best shot, so the cover of the Sports Section was all mine. They had a few questions and we all had a good laugh. I also had a bit of a mess to clean up. In two weeks I'll shoot my first HS football game of the season with a Nikon D7200 (8 fps) with a Tamron G2 70-200mm at 4000 ISO, 1/1000 at f2.8. I'll "key" the best ones and during a timeout, transfer them to my phone for a quick edit and crop, then send... I'll probably shoot five times more images (360 v 72), they'll be in color and in every technical way, a better image. I appreciate the megapixels comparison but the ability shoot under low light (without changing film) and instant editing is without comparison. Thanks for allowing me to take this sentimental trip.

[@fenixlolnope361]

film photos still look better though :3

[@workdevice7808]

Loved your sentimental trip. Fascinating. Thanks for the insight.

[@Quidisi]

Ah, thanks for taking us back in time. I can't believe you developed film WHILE driving 😳😆🤣 I shot an FE2 & 180mm f 2.8 back in high school in the 80s. My best friend and I had a utility room that his parents graciously let us convert into a dark room. We developed B+W. Went to 2 different high schools, but were both photographers at each. Great times. Throw that Nikon around my neck and I was never questioned about admission tickets, nor where i went. I would even climb up on the press box roof (which was stupid, looking back now as an adult) and no one would say a word. Great times! Again, thanks for sharing your memories. Meant a lot to me, this morning :)

[@geoffreymee7671]

Luv your story sir.

[@CitEnthusiast]

Excellent story. Changing bags were always fun. The old guys were always struggling to keep up with the young ones who were always finding ways to one-up them. I am from that era as well, although a few years earlier, and like you would not go back!

[@MaxTSanches]

As a new photographer I would shoot Kodachrome 25 (ASA 25) for very fine outdoor shot. And got great resolution even when projecting it onto a screen and getting a 10 foot image. It wasn't until you got within a foot of the image that you could see the grain. For indoors I would shoot Fujichrome 400 many times pushed to 800. With Kodachrome 64 and 200 for the inbetween days. When at technical school I was able to use a land camera that was used for surveying. It used glass plates with an ASA of 1. I shot a building from about 300 feet away with an effective 50mm lens and was able to read the dials on the gas meter, each of which was the size of a small watch face. I could read the hand, the numbers, and the makers mark on the bottom when I'd blow it up. The nice thing with digital is that it is: fast - no waiting a week for developing, cheap - I don't have to pay for developing, relatively unlimited - with a 64Gig memory card I can shoot all day vs having to carefully decide if a shot is worth 1/36th of my roll. And it is normally viewed on a computer screen.

[@karkigann]

ASA 1? Never knew that existed but when I took grad level histology, we were to take photographs of the prepared tissue slides. We could use our own film (Kodachrome 25 or Ektachrome suggested) or they had ASA 8 (or 7? It's been 40 years now). That was free but then you had to pay for processing and it could only be processed by Kodak in NY. Was specialized film for research and the like of tissues, bacteria, microanatomy.

[@TheHamNinja]

This is a question that I've asked as well after adding film back to my tool bag. (I shot film for ~30 years). I use a service to develop and scan my negatives (I used to have a Nikon scanner) and I have to believe that converting to digital introduces some another quirk. Having my film scanned at the highest resolution offered (pretty much the same max offered everywhere), the ability to crop is incredibly limited. Although the amount of data I receive is huge, the actual usability of that is limited). I'd say 10MP is the effective max. This contradicts many BLOGS who reference good scientific measures. In summary, there is the scientific number, and then the actual resultant usable image. For sure, 35mm film is awesome, just don't expect to crop. Knowing I can't really crop that much in post forces me to be even more purposeful when I pull the trigger. Thanks for the video. Disclaimer: I'm an idiot.

[@SmallSpoonBrigade]

The correct answer when scanning is to use whatever the maximum SPI the scanner handles without software interpolation. That can then be converted down to something that reflects the actual grain size of the film you're working with. Trust me, it makes a significant difference versus if you just scan at whatever resolution seems to match the film's grain. 10MP sounds about right for typical film though.

[@thomasauslander3757]

The disclaimer is Unacceptable:

[@kuroneko9710]

YOU ARE NOT AN IDIOT! The real MP value of a very good 35-mm COLOR film paired with a professional lens never exceeds 11.5 MP.

[@andrewinaustintx]

Going back to my darkroom days, on an analog 11x14" print of a full 35mm frame, upon close in inspection, I could clearly see the limits of the 35mm film format. One advantage was there was no software updates needed to print a negative using an analog enlarger onto photographic paper - but the process of getting a near perfect print was time consuming

[@Falc0n215]

Back in the early 2000s I took a correspondence course on photography from the New York Institute, and one thing I remember them saying about digital in that day was that it was a long way from becoming comparable to the quality of film. They talked a lot about the size of the silver halide crystals in the emulsion layer of the film compared to the size of the effective pixels on a CMOS sensor, and how you could blow up a 35 mm into a print the size of a wall mural and still have acceptable quality. At the time I had a 5 MP Sony 717 and it took fine photos, as long as you didn’t try to blow them up too large. But they were right, it still didn’t compare to 35 mm film. One thing I’ve always found fascinating about color in digital cameras, is how you lose about a third of your color resolution because you have to dedicate about a third of the space on the CMOS sensor to one of the three colors. So I always wondered how for instance NASA was able to get such amazing quality in the photos taken by the Voyager spacecraft using 1970s technology. In scientific digital cameras they get around this by making the sensor sensitive only to light levels and not color. Essentially it’s a black-and-white camera. Color was applied by shooting multiple exposures through different colored filters, and then combining these into a “true“ color image. So it’s possible to get some amazing detail out of an 800 x 800 digital image, using the right techniques.

[@bsmukler]

This brings up another subject: the effect of deleting the Bayer filter and solely measuring light intensity for every pixel, as in Leica’s Monochrom cameras. As you noted at the end, one’s perception (or “feeling”) certainly plays a part, similar to comparing ultra clean digital music files with the characterful sounds from a record (and phonograph).

[@michaelappleyard6300]

Having taken both 35mm colour and full frame digital photographs for many years, I sometimes asked myself the same question as the one which you have raised. I mainly use Kodak Gold 200 colour negative film metered at 100 ISO since it offers realistic colours, reasonable speed and relatively fine grain compared with most other C41 emulsions. I have observed that the grain size and this emulsion's inherent sharpness limitations (acutance, I think is the term) only really become apparent at print or display sizes of above A4 when viewed at a normal distance, i.e.at around arms length. At such a distance, the human eye will not detect "digitization" at resolutions of 200 dots per inch or finer. At A4 size 200 dpi equates to about a total of around 4 million dots over the whole area. So my conclusion, in answer to the question, is 4 Mp for this particular film type. I also checked this out by shooting the same scene, using high quality lenses, with a 35mm SLR and with a 36 Mp DSLR while cropping the latter by 2/3rds vertically and horizontally so as to only use 1/9th of the sensor area: i.e. the central 4 Mp of the sensor. The resulting resolution was subjectively similar to that of the 35mm images when viewed at a large magnification. The negatives had been scanned with a 24 Mp camera, by the way. Using the same film type in a 6 x 9 cm camera therefore ought to provide the equivalent of 22 Mp resolution since these negatives have 5.5x the area of the 35mm ones. So this should allow images to be viewed at a bit over A2 size before the resolution starts to break down when viewed at arms length, and this is exactly my experience. Of course, once one is making prints of A2 size or bigger, they will normally be viewed from a greater distance than arms length and this will make them seem sharper still - which is a win-win for medium format in general.

[@francoisleveille409]

My simplistic impression of this video's title is : - it depends on the 35mm film's ISO as higher ISO means lower definition - it depends on the brand and level of quality of the 35mm - it depends how the 35mm was developed as '1hour photo' development is probably the lowest quality you can get Also, everything you say about dpi and print/display size is perfectly true but it is totally irrelevant in this particular case because you would expect the 35mm shot to be displayed at a very similar size as the digital picture for a fair comparison.

[@thomasauslander3757]

Thank you for your hard work experimentation.. 👍

[@gregfaris6959]

I'm surprised you find Kodak Gold to have "realistic colors". As a large-format photographer since the early 1970's the reason I will no longer use film for any color work is that all the professional emulsions - the Ektachromes, the Vericolors and the Fuji and Agfa equivalents have been discontinued, leaving only amateur point-and-shoot products like Kodak Gold, with its garish, cartoon-like colors. I still have some stock of Aerocolor IV(2460) and Agfa PE1-X100 in the freezer that I use for some 4x5 aerial work, but when the aerial film labs cease to operate (soon) that will be the end of that as well. Fortunately, black-and-white film is simple enough, as is its processing chemistry, that it will probably never go away completely, and the enduring work of the great black-and-white film artists will continue to spur amateurs into a worl of discovery in image making unimagined to most digital shooters.

[@michaelappleyard6300]

@@gregfaris6959I certainly would not wish to doubt your personal experience in this matter. As far as mine goes, I find that Kodak Gold - using my own particular (peculiar, maybe) method of inverting and editing - can produce natural results which are subtle and in no way garish but are nevertheless quite distinct from digital. Having tried the other popular C41 films, I very much prefer the Gold stuff. I graduated recently from 35mm to medium format (6 x 9 cm) and have seen a huge boost in image quality but can imagine that your large format black-and-whites are at another level altogether for sharpness and detail.

[@twoeggcups]

Kodak Gold is an horrendous film. You literally wouldn’t have touched it with a barge pole in the 1990s.

[@nathanwoodruff9422]

My Cannon 9000F Mark II comes with attachments to scan 35mm, 70mm, 100mm, and 120mm film. It will scan color positive and color negative film at 9600DPI and has the option to scan at 48bit color. A 35mm film picture scanned at 9600DPI at 48bit color even with .jpg compression will give an output file anywhere from 50Mb to 65Mb. The output of this Cannon 9000F scanner is stinking AMAZING. My dad had a 120mm camera back in the 1950's to 1960's. There is a photo my dad took on the side of a mountain in North Carolina looking down at the parking lot possibly 1000Ft below. Scanning the 120mm film at 9600DPI and 48bit color giving an output over 1Gb and then looking at the output picture of the scanner, zoomed to 100%, I'm able to read license plates of the cars at the bottom of the mountain. And... this is 1960's.... What a great scanner Cannon 9000F is.

[@abrogard142]

well that kinda settles the question doesn't it? what sort of MP camera do we need to read licence plates at 1000ft ?

[@nathanwoodruff9422]

@@abrogard142 _"what sort of MP camera do we need to read licence plates at 1000ft ?"_ Well, it depends on the film... I doubt 35mm film would give that kind of detail.

[@abrogard142]

@@nathanwoodruff9422 nope... question put badly... I meant what 'size' (in megapix) digital camera do we need?

[@nathanwoodruff9422]

@@abrogard142 _"nope... question put badly... I meant what 'size' (in megapix) digital camera do we need?"_ 8.5 inches x 17 inches camera. Cannon makes a number of them. But the 9000F is one of the best cameras.

[@abrogard142]

@@nathanwoodruff9422 so how many megapixels does that camera have?

[@benthompson9717]

In our family, dad shot exclusively Kodachrome 64 with a Zeiss camera and had the typical family gatherings for slide shows of vacations and holidays! No matter what the MP are, nothing replaces the family gatherings, laughter at vacation and holiday pictures, and even more so when Dad would reach back decades to pull old slides into the show!! Best family gatherings I have memories of and wish more people would have that experience! My first camera was in 1980 when I bought a Canon A1 and FD 24mm f1.4 L, and yeah, I shot slides, although I used more 100 and 200 ASA. There was a company that bought unused 35mm movie film and cut it up into 36 exposure rolls, which I used for many years. I loved film. Often there was one chance to compose and get "the shot", cable releases for birds in nests, etc. Life was good. Now with the single press of a button and pre-capture on my R5 MkII, I shoot the equivalent of an entire roll of film! I still have my old gear, the A1 has to too characteristic shutter squeak, but I don't use it anymore.

[@ericanderson2482]

Depends on the film. How many bits of audio do you get in a vinyl recording?

[@turkfiles]

I’m so glad I came across this video. This is exactly what I have been. Wondering about lately. Thank you so much. I have a Minolta SRT 201 from 1977 that I still use to this day. I truly love my good old-fashioned, film camera! However, I do have a camera that has 48 megapixel definition.

[@annelarrybrunelle3570]

As both the shooter and consumer of my images, I have to point out that whatever images are captured are functionally invisible until displayed in/on a medium a human eye can see - a print or a screen. Also, we know that either image technology allows for enlargement of some kind and some amount, and that all image technologies must deal with a range of available light and whatever effects there may be of camera motion during the shot. For a color print, you will have the result on photo paper at the maximum resolution of the printer. It turns out (say the people who sell prints) that, while an inkjet printer such as might be part of an automatic printing machine, or even the one on your desk, may produce a resolution of perhaps as many as 600 x 1200 dpi of ink spit onto the page, color dots are composed of varying proportions of CMYK "spits", which necessarily run together. The functional dpi will be closer to 200. And, curiously, that is more resolution than the human eye typically finds useful; the image arrives on the retinas of our pair of "cameras", from some variable distance in some variable lighting, and then undergoes the brain's "software" processing. It's instructive to use a magnifier on such a print, and then on color images in magazines such as Flying. For images on a screen, so much of our perception depends on the size of the display or the projector screen (yep, we still have some). Enlarging technology: of course, historically, we have the best that optics can do, and that is very, very good, with a crisp hi-res image to start with. Digital enlargement can interpolate, creating additional pixels as needed; it's probably more common to set the number of pixels to what can be represented on print media, or for transmission, which is usually a reduction. Anyway, we have a LOT of post-processing control available in the software. But something we can have digitally that is VERY difficult to get using film: zoom and corresponding cropping in the camera. A 20x zoom point'n'shoot camera tucks in your pocket, costs less than an SLR body, and allows the use of the glass to capture a full-res image, cropped and framed as you want it. You can't do that for a similar zoom range in 35mm without something much heavier, bulkier, and more intrusive, meaning you might not even have the camera with you. Did I mention the cost of the camera? And the film? And the processing? And the time before you can view the images? Or the incredible NUMBER of images you can get onto an SD card? All of these concerns mean that the digital camera has a much higher chance of capturing the images you need/desire, and at a higher FUNCTIONAL resolution. Is film dead? NO! But it is now definitely a much more "technical" choice, and, due to the change in scale of the market, comparatively more expensive than decades ago.

[@stever2583]

I am still seeing the relics of snobbery regarding film. Simply any enhancements are not possible if not captured on (Digital) the sensors or on (Film) on the chemistry of the film. Perhaps by looking into a pinhole setup you might better understand how simple photography is. Sensors regardless of how powerfull they are can not capture what film does. Film can capture measles or chickenpox prior to being visible to the naked eye. Digital can not do that!

[@montefleming8390]

Interesting video. I used a Nikon EL2 for many years. When I got a Canon 6D, I finally felt like I had a digital camera that could come close to achieving what the EL2 could.

[@abrogard142]

so you figure 20MP to make them equal.

[@montefleming8390]

@@abrogard142 right--about 20 MP on a full-frame sensor, with the low-light sensitivity of the 6D. It may be of interest that I found the 33 MP Sony A7IV just as capable of digitizing 35 mm negatives as the 50 MP A1. With the A7IV, the individual grains of the film occupy multiple pixels and I couldn't see any gain in clarity with the extra pixels of the A1. (I find the A7IV more capable than my old Nikon EL2.)

[@garydmercer]

This was figured out years ago by those of us pro photographers making the transition to digital. Nothing new here. Shot with foveon sensors for years. Now I shoot with a Sony A7 R 3. Love it.

[@luzr6613]

Appreciated the information, but i hope nobody actually worries about this or thinks it's particularly important for the practice of photography.

[@Pozi_Drive]

Anything above 12 MP is overkill. Good glass is more important.

[@luzr6613]

@@Pozi_Drive I agree with you on the glass. For me - and I do have 12MP cameras - I always felt the glass had more to offer, and a few weeks at 16MP, and now at 20MP, has given me a dramatic improvement in IQ. I found the improvement on par with going from a kit zoom to a fast prime - and I can crop a bit if I need to now. The other thing is that the 20MP body is a superior tool in all respects - my older bodies don't have the balance, ergonomics and the ability to 'get out of the way of taking photos', although none of that is about MP count.

[@Pozi_Drive]

@@luzr6613 How would you have survived in the analog, wet chemistry, film era?

[@paulneedham9885]

@@Pozi_Drivethat doesn’t matter. It’s in the past and he doesn’t shoot film lol

[@Pozi_Drive]

@@paulneedham9885 The only thing in the world that doesn't matter is you.

[@dima1353]

I scanned a Fuji Reala at 20 megapixels and saw pretty fair details on 100% magnification, but it reminds me of ISO 1600 on digital without noise reduction - when you still see details at the pixel level, but as if behind a veil of noise. If you like this kind of image structure, you can call it 20mp - But that's certainly not what a Shutterstock inspector would like, for example. I would roughly estimate the detail of amateur "200" films to be about 6-12 mp depending on your tolerance for this veil of noise. But it always makes sense to scan at a higher resolution.

[@ThenameisAntti]

In short: -How many megapixels is 35mm film? -No.

[@fiddleandfart]

Actually zero. 'Cos it's an analogue medium. Like comparing digital sound recording (lotsa bits), with analogue recording. Which raised all those arguments about whether you can hear, or in photography, see, the (bumpy/edgy) difference. That argument continues..!

[@TFD31415]

Thank you for saving 5 min of my life

[@you2be839]

Actually yes, but not really.

[@bd048]

This is a good estimate.

[@Вейвед]

1:54 🥴

[@alanmacmillan6957]

I've done a load of scanning and typically scan around 2400dpi - a lot of the images i turned out were about 3200 x 2200 which is approx 7 megapixel. I've scanned others at 3600, 5600, and 7200 dpi but you get no more real information from a 35mm film. you're just burning space on the computer you don't really need to. what i will say though is with slide film , the grain is so subtle you can blow it up many times over on projector on the wall and it looks great.

[@troystaten5633]

Very nice write up. About 22-23 years ago when I was still shooting professionally I got my first digital SLR a Canon D60 which was a 6 mega pixel camera. I was doing some head shots for a client with strobes etc and did a side by side head shot with the same lens on a film SLR and the D60. The film was Kodak Portra 160 and I used an ISO setting on the camera of 125. I then had 8x10 prints made by from each image by a top notch lab and side by side you could not tell the difference in image quality. There was some difference in the color tone but you could not tell which was digital and which was film. IMHO the new digital cameras are so versatile and the image quality is so good there is really no reason to ever shoot film.

[@Andrew-rc3vh]

I spend a fair bit of time a while back messing about with anti-aliasing pixel lines. It's a neat trick where you can trick your eyes into thinking you are seeing a nice clean edge, but close up it hardly looks like an edge at all. There are all these algorithms for drawing lines and circles to give the best approximation as well and some mathematical tricks to speed up computation. It was kind of hands on learning.

[@TheMrGoncharov]

This video would be much more useful if you provided analysis and calculations

[@kirkcircus]

I think he explains it very well with the overall analysis and detail. Actual calculations would be far too varied and subjective.

[@tomsun3159]

Yes i would like medium Format films 6*6, 4,5*6, 6*9 with common 120 Films, and even large formats would be interesting. And of course the difference between B&W and colour (positive/negative)

[@hanshomesteading1276]

I've been shooting raw since 2003, since I had my first DSLR (Canon 300d). There has been a steep improvement in algorithms for interpolations, i.e. the calculation of the missing colors for each pixel. So the resolution of the digital cameras has improved. in fact even the pictures from old digital camera's capable shooting raw have improved. Processing raw images from 2003 in 2024, show an increase in resolution. That said, the simple megapixel count is very hard, considering digital camera megapixel count is also still 'unstable'.

[@petrpohnan875]

I have been on top of this topic when I was considering switching to digital. Made tens of comparisons of final pictures mostly on A3 and A2 sized prints. With ISO 100 the Canon 10D was with its 6 Mpix trailing a slight bit behind a good resolution film at scanned on a professional drum scanner. So the decision was clear with upcoming digital resolution increments.

[@mooremob100]

You hit the nail on the head when you said that film/digital is subjective, many years ago it was a big subject when MPx was small in cameras in the late 1990s most professional comments that Digital would be as good as a film when it reaches 12 to 15 MPx. just my 2 pennies worth.

[@septimusseverus7237]

in a sensor "each pixel" is basically a photodiode which contrary to what is said in the video, is not capturing "either red, green or blue light". Each photodiode in a sensor only captures one level of incoming energy photons and in a sense a sensor is basically color blind. It is up to the Beyer matrix filter sitting in front of the sensor matrix of photodiodes to filter out incoming white light and associate either a red or green or blue value to each underlying photodiode, so that a subsequent interpolation is made on a grouping of several adjacent pixels for interpolating a "single pixel" colored value. This is why camera sensors dedicated to black&white phtography (for instance Leica monochrom cameras) have a higher resolution compared to color cameras, simply due to the absence of the Beyer matrix filter removing the grouping interpolation and allowing to use each photodiode of the sensor to render a pixel in final image.

[@mervmartin2112]

Don't forget the darkroom. The type and strength of the chemicals used affect the resolution. Along with processes like dodging, tinting and solarization. In black and white, Microdol-X developer will give you a finer grain structure than D-76. Finer grain makes the image sharper, larger grain (D-76) makes the image softer. So an image of my sweetie's tongue gets Microdol-X, her curves get D-76.

[@autokrohne]

All true. There are too many variations with film to arrive at a definitive megapixel number. In my practical experience, starting with film in the late 1970s and diving deep into darkroom mechanics and chemistry through the 1980s, I would say that digital photography has surpassed the resolution of film in a practical sense some time ago. (Probably when it crossed the 20 megapixel boundary.) In the early 2000s, I noticed that the scans of my film negatives had a higher resolution than the film. As digital cameras got better, I shot less on film that was later scanned. Photoshop became my darkroom and a step away from toxic chemicals. It gave me so much more control over the final image.

[@mervmartin2112]

@@autokrohne I was a black and white guy, 'till my stroke. Had switched mostly to caffinol and wineol. Great fun! I'm working on getting back. Wet plate always sounded like fun and with 3D printing I can build a lot of what I couldn't afford. BTW there's a pretty good re-creation of the Brownie #2A at Thingiverse (I think)

[@ElementaryWatson-123]

You just scan the negative, denoise and sharpen in software and get a decent result.

[@dct124]

4mp-20mp is the general answer. If you want details, find Ken Rockwell - Film Resolution article. Full frame digital is 35mm photography equivalent (with sound strips area). APS-C digital is 35mm motion picture equivalent (1.5x sensor). S35 digital is 35mm motion picture equivalent (without cropping the sound strip area). Highest 35mm film scan was 87mp x 2 = 175mp. Basically b/c our digital sensors aren't True RGB data. Most of our sensors are Bayer sensors, so you'd need a Foveon X3 Sensor for True RGB. The closest we have currently to True RGB is stacked sensors from Sony which is in the Nikon Z9, Z8. Canon R5 ii, R1, R3, Sony A1, A1 ii. I'd have to look but I think it's in a few other models. But it's still not 100% TRUE RGB.

[@hudsonch]

I have been using a 24 mp full frame mirrorless camera and a decent macro lens to digitize my old Kodachrome 25 or 64 35mm slides. For the slides of best quality (correct exposure, in focus), I get about 12 to 13 mp resolution.

[@glennledrew8347]

A direct comparison of imaging media can be obtained by imaging a resolution test chart using the same high quality lens. The linear resolving power, in line pairs per millimeter can be directly measured, which value when squared supplies a functional pixel count per unit area ratio. This can be conducted over a range of test chart contrast, which supplies information on useful dynamic range. In all instances, noise in the medium must be accounted for statistically by taking suitable measures to mitigate. For film noise is the grain structure; in digital sensors noise is a combination of intrinsic pixel sensitivity variance and thermally induced spurious variance.

[@joebloggs4369]

Long time ago, I used to prepare images for use in preparing masks for manufacturing chips in a University electronics department. The "measurement" for the resolution of film used was "line pairs per mm" that is the number of adjacent, parallel lines that could be recorded before they started to merge on the film emulsion (and consequently cause a potential short circuit on the mask). From hazy memory, the preferred film was a Kodak technical film who's name escapes me. For some reason the figure 2,000 sticks in my mind. This was specialised black and white, of course and not colour.

[@kid5Media]

Nearly twenty years ago I went to a presentation at the University of Washington that was the unveiling of one of the few full size copies of the Big Book of Bhutan, which measures about 3 feet by 5 feet. About half the pictures were taken with digital cameras. I asked the presenter at what point the digital matched the film cameras and he said eight megapixels.

[@reallynotpc]

What a lot of interesting, well-informed and well-explained comments! Thanks to you all!

[@jorgelima5695]

From my experience digitizing all my old negatives and slides, I can reassure that there is no way spatial resolution or color dynamic range in a film is even comparable to what can be achieved with a modern digital camera. This is so true that the advent of digital cameras forced the industry to come up with new and better lens designs capable of taking advantage modern sensors. Having said that, I think film is cool and some people even like the film grain, which looks better than the noise in digital images. But that's purely subjective.

[@TheParadoxDestroyer]

Shooting film is aesthetically pleasing. The process is by nature slower, more thinking is involved on some levels, and as a result, more immersive. You have to truly know light and shadow working with a fully manual film camera. You have to see on a deeper level and be more deliberative with the shutter, if for no other reason than the cost!

[@jfess1911]

Although "best film under ideal conditions" was mentioned, there was no discussion about it. Back when I used 35mm film, there was a noticeable difference in films designed to work in low light vs full sunlight. The image got much grainier with 400 or 500 ASA film (low light) vs a 100 or 64 ASA film. It got even worse if you "pushed" the processing to get useable photos out of film that received too little light for normal processing.

[@TheTensecondz]

Back in early 2000, there was an article stating film resolution was equivalent to around 3MP by doing pixel-peeping of the images. Wonder what changed now to up that equivalency to 20MP.

[@davestokes3446]

Nothing has changed, it's still the same.

[@alansach8437]

I remember reading a similar article back then stating 6mp.

[@mrlightwriter]

I remember it. It was a comparison between the Canon D30 and Provia 100F, by Michael Reichmann, from Luminous Landscape. At the time, very few believed that the Canon D30, at 3MP, was equivalent to Provia 100F, but eventually most photographers ended up agreeing with him.

[@MikeBanks2003]

That depends on which film and which dye-couplers are used. Kodachrome 25 was about 12 megapixel equivalent.

[@IbrahimAli-wt5js]

شكرا على هذه المعلومات 👍 هذا ما كنت أبحث عنه تحياتي من 🇱🇧

[@bruncebanani8854]

I'd like to carefully question that. I recently digitised my old film slides and thereby realised just how poor the resulution was. It was more like 3-5 MPixels. I didn't use a very expensive lens back in the day, but it was no crappy cheap one either. I used a professional scanner (~2000$) that I rented for this purpose and quickly realised that it doesn't make any sense to scan the slides at the maximum resolution the scanner could do. Which, btw, was also

[@CitEnthusiast]

This video is short on actual evidence. Just saying that a certain resolution is needed to match film is not enough, there needs to be references or actual scientific evidence using reference charts. We have always had ways to measure the resolution of a camera lens, so that technique could be used to compare film vs. digital resolution. At the same time he mis-states that film captures all colors. Color film is made up of layers with filters between the layers. Blue is at the top, then green, then red (it's complicated so this is not all there is on this subject). So factually he gets this wrong. And the size of grain is a major factor in film resolution with Kodak's Kodachrome 25 being considered the highest resolving film ever produced at the consumer level. I do not know the fellow making this video, nor his bonafides. I am a retired photographer, spending 21 years as a photographer in the US Air Force where I helped develop and deploy digital photography for the entire Air Force, supervising deployment of digital photographic systems worldwide in 1994, and another couple of decades working with/for DoD managing the digital imagery archive. We (the USAF and in particular my unit) worked very closely with Kodak developing the first digital SLR (the first was the DCS 100 followed by a much more portable DCS 200), and we worked with every major player in the industry including Sony, Canon, Nikon, Polaroid and many more. I was tasked with final approval of any digital photographic equipment purchases by the USAF Depot at Hill AFB until I left that position and went to work at the Department of Defense. I won't bore readers with more than that except to say that I also established the DoD digital image archive on the WWW in 1995, and established the digital imagery standards for DoD and helped get the National Archives to accept those standards (not the best image quality as the standard, but what a "record" is, it's fairly complicated). We were producing very large posters in 1994 using the DCS 200 which had just a 1.3 MP sensor. We used large plotters that employed stoichiometric printing algorithms. The principle is that when viewed from the correct distance you saw essentially a clear photo, but get up close and it's like looking at a printed photo in a magazine (using lithographic printing) under a strong magnifying glass, you can see the dots. Just don't confuse that with image resolution. I guess my point (finally?) is that this video proposes to provide some technical information, but without laying out any actual evidence. I'm only one of hundreds of experts in this field, dating back to the infancy of the wide-spread use of digital cameras, and not one of those people would make such a video. Kodak waded into this subject back in the mid-90s (1994 to be more exact) and thought that when sensors reached 5 MP in a full-size 35mm sensor you could state that it equaled Kodachrome 25. Note that I called out a specific film to measure against, that's critical. We are far beyond that today.

[@frankmansour362]

How much magnification you can get max on film and digital

[@edwardsierpowski3839]

Was pleased to see ‘my’ canon AE1 in the thumbnail! But as for the topic… it was a bit muddled. Detail and crispness was always my objective and to find out which is better you need to take an image of the same area (my suggestion is of a library bookcase) with each camera (film and various Meg side digital) then keep blowing up the image of each to find keeps it’s detail clarity for longest. Hence the preference of the image of a bookcase and the book spines. I’m pretty certain many if not all the digital images will lose definition before the 35mm negative. We are of course discussing regular cameras for normal every day use and accessible by the general public.

[@chicobicalho5621]

This is a fun subject, and interesting to analyze. Of course, the evolution of digital for the past 25 years has been amazing, but now "resolution" became a bit of a nerdy subject since it is an easy thing to achieve. Of course medium format digital is fantastic, and when we have the digital viewfinder it gets amazing, since reflex is definitely dead, and for a good reason. And the end of reflex is a great digital conquest. There are photographers using 4x5 cameras with analog film, scanning the chromes, to make digital prints and other photographers, like Sebastião Salgado, shooting high resolution digital, and making internegatives on 4x5 analog film to make silver print enlargements. As a photographer born in 1960, who has done analog and digital, I say this is a pretty exciting era because one can do anything, as I do digital and also platinum/palladium contact prints from 5x7 negatives. But, a 6x7 image on Fuji 50 is hard to beat, as is a projection in 2¼² with a Hasselblad PCP-80 slide projector is an image hard to match in terms of spectacle. Then there is the magic of analog that digital definitely does not have; the Barthes' "footprint" which digital can never have. When I see a Daguerreotype, it is impossible to disassociate from the fact that the very image we are seeing was in the "physical presence" of the subject it captured, much the same way a chrome is, and with digital this is never the case. And as an environmentalist, I thank all the Goddesses and Gods for digital photography, for it ended the nefarious C41 one hour photo market that was so polluting.

[@Choetaesun]

Very useful info! Thanks!!!

[@kellygrant4964]

Unless I missed it someplace... what ASA would this be equating to? The speed of the film vastly changes the "resolution". Monster difference between 1000 and 100. Want to see grain... shot 3600black and white and "push" it to over 12000.

[@batman51]

Would a useful way to compare the two mediums be to take two identical pictures with an analogue and a digital camera and see which picture you can enlarge the most before the picture qualtiy degrades?

[@kirkdarling4120]

I was shooting portraits with a Mamiya RZ67 (6x7cm format) with Kodak Professional Portra 160 film when I bought a Canon 5D (12 megapixels). I compared two images of a half-length portrait with medium focal length lenses on both cameras, identical subject, identical framing, identical lighting. In both cases, extreme enlargements just barely captured the brand imprint on the edges of the subject's contact lenses. IMO the internal contrast of the film image was slightly superior, but in terms of acuity, the 12 megapixel 24x36mm digital image was almost identical to the 60x70mm film image. That was the image that convinced me to retire my film cameras.

[@cujet]

I still remember the Kodak Ektar 100 color negative film. Advertised as having very fine grain. We loved it for outdoor pics in sunny Florida. Could you really zoom in on an invisible mountain climber 25 miles away as the Kodak ad implied? Not really. But the stuff was darn sharp when used correctly.

[@twoeggcups]

@@cujet I shit a few rolls of Agfa Dia Direct in the 90s - that stuff was ISO 12 (I think) and as fine grained as I’ve ever seen. The other ultra fine grain film available was Kodak Technical Pan, also very slow. I used some to shoot moving water and steam at night with very long exposures.

[@groover5524]

Very good presentation of what is a very tricky subject ! So easy to go. off track on this one .

[@workdevice7808]

Excelllent video. I agree with the estimate of 20 megapixels for film. 10 years ago 16 megapixels seemed to be the consensus but it's definitely in that ball park. Lots of people here with much lower estimates but they're not taking account of 20 years of lens developement since film cameras were the norm. Also, the comparison has to be with a scan from low ASA slide film.

[@digitaldevigner4080]

Bayer sensors are a bit more complex. While it looks like they are missing samples what’s really important is how they are evenly spaced and distributed where only a single in between sample is missing. The debayering process helps interpolate or guess what those missing values are. So it’s not just you need 4x4 pixels. It’s a lot more complicated math than that where each missing red pixel looks to the red pixels on each side and the red samples above and below to the side. In some cases the process can even look at the blue and green to determine what is really going on with the detail. Green is much easier to predict since it has a real pixel on all four sides of a missing pixel. This allows the guessing to be pretty accurate yet still a bit fuzzy. It’s an average of those surrounding values so it will naturally create a softness. Green is used more for the luminance or brightness which help the detail of the image more. While film does not use pixels of course what we can compare is the acutance which is the ability to resolve fine natural detail. At a certain point film resolves no more details and if we keep scanning larger we just end up with larger blobs of grainy color. At a certain point you gain no added detail by scanning larger. This is precisely why medium and large format film exist. In order to get more detail you need a larger type of film. You need more surface area. Distal uses pixels and as long as you don’t zoom in or blow it up you should never see those pixels. We compare the acutance of film and digital and try to come up with the point where they both resolve the same fine detail. Usually when looking at them at the same 1:1 scale. This is how we can say film resolve X amount of pixels. It’s the point at which the pixels of a digital image resolve the same amount of fine detail. A blade or grass looks like a blade of grass on both. My general rule I borrowed and adapted from cinematographers is that film roughly resolves around 150 points per mm. That puts it right at the 20 MP mentioned in this video. 5400x3600 for 35mm photography. S35mm film for motion pictures is the same film but turned sideways so it’s only 24mm wide. That means it’s about 3600 pixels wide. That’s why 4k has in some way surpassed the acutance resolving detail of S35mm motion picture film. That’s what is shot. What’s projected in cinemas on film is typically only about 21mm wide because it makes space for the audio. That’s 3150 wide or much lower than 4k video. What about that bayer loss? Well yes that can happen on a 4k only sensor for video. We have over sampling for that where a 6k or 8k sensor is used to overcome that bayer loss. Digital photos have higher MP counts for that same reason. A 45 MP sensor scaled down with have no bayer sensor loss. Not that it even matters. A 20MP is more than capable of resolving the same detail since digital is naturally more precise.

[@ChrisThe1]

Resolution of color film tends to be only 5-10mp; 20 you'll get on good black and white film. Film is better at capturing color resolution because of its multi layered approach, so its color resolution will match its luminance resolution. This means that if you have a 8mp resolving piece of 35mm film you'll get 8mp of both color and luminance resolution. In digital terms you'd have to use a 24mp sensor to get similar color resolution, although now you obviously get much higher luminance resolution. Overall pretty good take tho, and good explanation. I just recently saw a video of someone explaining this in a horrible and wrong way; this is way better. Also film definitely doesn't have more dynamic range than digital sensors anymore.

[@ElementaryWatson-123]

A thick emulsion in color film can reduce resolution. When the emulsion is thicker, light has to pass through more material, which can cause scattering and diffusion of light. If these layers are too thick or not finely tuned, the light captured in the deeper layers can be slightly less focused, reducing overall resolution. A thicker emulsion can also mean larger or more grains of silver halide, which can increase the appearance of graininess in the image.

[@bempartington4299]

thankyou!

[@scudosmyth784]

I just enjoy taking photos, in the 60s I developed my own b&w (120 film) just cause I could, progressed to 35 mm, now on digital, taking everything in to account (as a non professional) digital is very much more practical for me as I don't have to worry about all the settings as I use photoshop for adjusting....A bit off topic but I have one of those old bellow cameras where it was glass plates and a cloak over the camera for viewing, I think its called a victo, Thornton Pickard.

[@garymazeffa1442]

Thank you for just getting to the key points...quickly.

[@alfredocuomo1546]

And that's why for top Portrait photographers still love their Hasselblad 2.25 x 2.25

[@adiamondforever7890]

I have also seen a few 645’s for portrait work (120 roll film). Have fun

[@SRBrown9032]

A comment I heard from a professional portrait photographer back in the 90's was that color in film was "layered" in a way that digital couldn't capture. I hear you saying essentially the same thing. I appreciate the explanation of color bits / pixel as a way of explanation. I also wonder if, in a burst mode, it might be possible with something electronic, like altering the sensitivity of one of the colors, or mechanical, like a minute shift of the image, might increase the color depth.

[@Tugela60]

Digital cameras in 2024 are vastly superior to anything available in the 90s.

[@adonian]

ISO 25-3200 make a huge difference… but I haven’t watched all of this video yet… but I am watching it now.

[@johnstepp8410]

I always thought it was more about the iso rating. I usually shot with 800 iso indoors which gave a warm photo under the light bulbs in use back then but used 100 iso or lower outside. Personally I think that with a digital camera anything above about 24 megapixels is a waste unless you are are using tif or raw format because you lose all that fancy resolution due to image compression. Spy cameras used to produce micro dots used isos as low as 1 bright lights (when possible) and long exposure times; the resolution was way up there.

[@SimonWallwork]

Some of the most pleasing images I've made were with the 5mp Olympus E-1. This is a complex subject.

[@twoeggcups]

@@SimonWallwork I have one as well. Such a satisfying camera. If you go back to the .ORFs from that camera and process them at double resolution in ACR you get a very pleasing result.

[@kennj321]

as far as I'm concerned the only 35mm film worth comparing to modern digital is Kodachrome. that stuff was amazing to me as a kid. Landscape shots on a sunny day with big clouds were amazing. Now here's the thing I miss the most. you could put those slides in a projector and they were amazing, you could get lost in them.. Even if modern digital photos are as good or better, there is no consumer or prosumer way to view digital photos in amazing a way as I remember seeing kodachrome slides with our old 70s slide projector.

[@danaxtell2367]

Agreed. Ten years ago I found my late father-in-law's Kodachrome slides from the big last day of the successful Selma-Montgomery march, on March 25, 1965. I researched and found out that Kodachrome deserves a specially designed scanner because the emulsion is so thick and layered. (If you look at the Kodachrome emulsion at a low angle, you see the terraces of the emulsion, unlike Ektachrome or other brands.) Any slide scanner can do OK with Kodachrome, but the varying thickness muddles things, particularly the infrared dust-and-scratch recognition. I bought a 2006 Nikon Coolscan 9000 for this reason. I bought it at online auction for $2000 ten years ago and that's still the price today for this 18-year-old scanner. (I also had thousands of other family Kodachrome family slides, so I may not have been crazy.) No one has improved upon the Coolscan LS-9000, as far as I know. After experimenting, I found a good setting (one pixel line per pass; don't bother with the multi scans, 5 minutes per scan). The Campsite 4 Interpretive Center (City of Saint Jude campus) now displays several of his remarkably detailed photos. He was in the scrum of 25,000 that day (only 300 did the whole march but multitudes were invited for the last day, including one UU representative from every congregation.). He had a valuable perspective and he chose expensive Kodachrome. (My dear mother-in-law probably objected to that expense.) I digress. I was lucky enough to have the money and time. I tried to maximize the detail from these unique slides. All scanners have iffy aspirational maximum resolutions. I settled on a setting that gave me 25 megapixels to my eye. This extreme effort jives with Photo Feaver's estimate of 20 megapixels. Thumbs up. Several of Nathaniel H. Gifford's detailed photos are displayed at the Campsite 4 Interpretive Center at the City of Saint Jude campus in Montgomery. Kodachrome was infamous for favoring lighter skin for detail, but I see the story-telling detail in every face in his 25 megapixel photos.

[@reinholdstreit7016]

I also agree with you that Kodachrome 25 was the sharpest slide film of all time! I used it from the very beginning as a hobby photographer with the Canon F-1 and the standard lens 55mm F 1.2 aspherical. However, towards the end of my analog photography I came out with the EKTAR 25 negative film, which in my opinion was a little bit better in terms of sharpness and grain. I digitized both films, the Kodachrome 25 and Ektar 25, with my Minolta 5400 II slide scanner. The digital images from the Ektar 25 are almost as good as those from a digital camera with 12 to 15 megapixel. In my opinion, I went from the line resolution under the microscope to the equivalent of about 16 megapixels of comparable DSLR cameras. That's why I started taking digital photos with the Canon EOS 550D with 18 megapixels. At the moment I use 2 Samsung NX1s, each with a sensor size of 28.2 million pixels. Above my 65 LG OLED TV I have a poster of the opera in Odessa (Ukraine) that is the same size as my TV screen (about 147 cm wide). The resolution is simply fantastic and unfortunately not achievable with any analog camera or film, perhaps only with the old black and white Kodak Technical Pan 2415. This is supposed to achieve several hundred line pairs per millimeter with a contrast of up to about 1000:1. From about 40 - 50 meters away from the opera entrance you can still read every line on the poster for the opera performance that was on at the time in Cyrillic script. Taken in July 2016 on my 10-day vacation in Odessa with the 30mm F 1:2.0 pancake lens, one of the sharpest lenses from Samsung for the NX1 DSLM. I had viewed the same image of the Odessa Opera House directly from my Samsung NX1 on an 85-inch Samsung 8K TV in December 2019, in exactly the same resolution as my poster from the 28,2 megapixel file. The 8K TV image on this TV was a lot better than my poster, incredibly sharp and very high-contrast, almost as if you were really standing in front of the opera. No slide projector or poster can keep up - simply fantastic! That's why my next TV will most likely be an 8K TV. Just viewing digital images on such a TV is worth the purchase. That's what makes viewing digital images and digitized old slides and negatives really worth it, in my opinion! Even the old scanned slides or negatives look better on the TV than with my expensive Leitz projector on a specially coated 2.5 meter wide slide screen. Since switching to digital photography in May 2010, I have never bought analog film again and have not used any of my old Canon cameras, although the color differentiation of some analog slides or negatives could perhaps be a little better.

[@CitEnthusiast]

@@danaxtell2367 All film when light at the proper angle will show up the "relief" image, not just Kodachrome. That's because all film has a physical layer structure, just some are more pronounced than others. I don't scan film to digitize it any more, years ago I started using a Nikon film adapter on my macro lens with a decently smooth light source, works great and much faster than scanning, and higher resolution. We used to use this same tool in the film days to duplicate slides, we called it a slide duplicator. Kodachrome 25 is definitely the film to use as the highest resolution film.

[@Erik-oe7gc]

I agree, plus it was simple to develop.

[@twoeggcups]

@@kennj321 I was an habitual user of Kodachrome 64 and - my absolute favourite film - Kodachrome 200 Professional. Used my Leica Pradovit slide projector for viewing. If you’ve never seen a good reversal (Kodachrome, Fuji Velvia etc) projected with an excellent projector then you’re missing out, there’s no digital experience quite like it. You could argue that a 4K OLED TV is similar, but it still has a way to go.

[@Soupie62]

From my photography experience, going back to the 80s: 100 ASA tended to be very fine grain, but only in daylight (or with a good flash). 1000 ASA was great for low light, but film grain was much larger. For low light digital, thermal noise is a thing. Larger pixels are more likely to detect a photon, meaning a better signal/noise ratio. For astrophotography, a sensor below 24MP will have less noise issues than a 48MP sensor. Unless you actively cool the sensor, or work in cold climates, which in turn impact the lifespan of the camera battery. A 3 hour exposure, in a snowy climate, is educational.

[@bobair2]

I use film for 30 years and switched to digital 20 years ago,I'm not going back just like I switched from vinyl to CDs ,not going back.

[@sunlbx]

a typical fine grain size (of silver halide) is 3 micron

[@PhilJonesIII]

Making photographic emulsions is a fascinating subject. Once a single grain is activated, it is reduced (through developing) to a single grain of silver. On their own, the grains are not especially sensitive so, we add imperfections to the crystal structure to increase their sensitivity. What was used and how it got applied was something guarded like the Coca Cola recipe.

[@rohkofantti8673]

That makes a resolution 8476 dpi.

[@maddogmcrae]

Got my first digital camera for Christmas in 1999, haven’t touched film since.

[@dwwolfe1]

The amount of film grain depends on the film speed (ISO/ASA). With smaller film speed numbers, the grain is smaller, too. Landscape photographers used very small (100 or less) ISO numbers or "slow" film to get fine detail while capturing big vistas. On the other end, high ISO film (1600 or greater) has very large grain, and is way more sensitive to light. Therefore, high-speed, low-light photographers used "fast" film to capture images at night without flash or sports action shots. Comparing digital to film is like comparing digital audio to analog. In theory, a needle on a vinyl record has no limit in frequency range. The same is true for magnetic tape. It depends on the medium's speed and the cartridge(s) or tape head(s) used to record and play the medium. Digital audio, like a digital camera, depends on the sample rate (resolution) of the capture device. An arguably more important factor when considering a digital camera is the physical sensor size. Larger sensors capture more light, not because of the megapixel count, but because they have a larger surface. Therefore, for low-light conditions, it's best to use a large sensor camera if available. However, I have to qualify that, too. Modern cell phone and security cameras capture a lot of light on a small sensor; enough to produce a full-color image from almost pitch-black conditions. Much if this is done in software, but it shows how far we've come with digital image technology.

[@stevemcmahon6803]

Just as different grain structures provide different resolutions there can be variety amongst digital sensors with the same pixel counts. Some Bayer sensors now do pixel shifting and can record each color channel on every pixel. Foveon sensors also capture colors separately and can yield higher resolutions than the numbers suggest.

[@transamericanlife]

Based on scanning my highest rez techpan negatives with a 33MP (5400dpi) Minolta scanner, I would get say 6-8 real megapixels. Before this experience, I would have estimated 12 megapixels. The advantage of using the 33 megapixel scanner was that I was able to see all of the grain. And I thought my contax camera was so much better. In terms of dynamic range, slide film got about 7-8 stops. Compare to my new Sony which gets about 15 stops of dynamic range.

[@brugj03]

This is in fact a completely senseless discussion, because for film to be shown on a modern digital medium it has to be translated to MP and that will reduce the real resolution even further.

[@artberry]

@@brugj03 But it's the optical resolution of the image captured on the film which is important. As long as scanning resolution exceeds that and one would normally seek to resolve the film grain in a scan I don't see how that reduces the real or optical resolution.

[@brugj03]

@@artberry Well, not really. It`s done with another optical instrument so it`s not only about the resolution. It`s a scanner with it`s own characteristic flaws, optical, mechanical an electronical. You basically take a complete digital picture which is again my point.

[@artberry]

​@@brugj03 Well I think one could argue digital photography is more direct because it doesn't need to be transcribed to a different medium in order to be viewed and appreciated. Even before digital technology film was reliant on devices for viewing and transcription to different media i.e. printing. So I don't think film has ever been appreciated in it's own right in the same way as a digital image can be.

[@twoeggcups]

@@transamericanlife Honestly, a scan never looks as good as a projected slide. If you want to see what kind of performance you can get out of film, shoot some Fuji Velvia and project it with a Leica or Zeiss lens. It will look spectacular. I’ve even tried using taking lenses with my projector and got very impressive results with an old Zeiss 85mm f2.8 and a 105mm Micro Nikkor. Unfortunately looking at projected slides isn’t a very transferable experience, and it certainly degrades the original to project it repeatedly. Digital makes all these problems go away.

[@pwx8460]

Side by side comparisons on my wall shows a 20 year old 8mp digicam blows away the resolution of a 35mm Velvia positive slide scanned with a dedicated slide scanner with an equivalent 50mp output. Are there other factors involved....absolutely. But enough difference to switch to digital in 2005 at far lower mp values than you're talking about.

[@gsum1000]

Monochrome film consists of minute silver salt crystal grains. The incidence of light alters the chemistry of a grain such that it decomposes to metallic silver when washed in developer. A grain is a classic example of a bi-stable and is perfectly analogous to a computer memory bit i.e. is a unit of information. In colour film the grains are set in dye of the appropriate colour depending on layer and whether the film is reversal or negative. It's always struck me as ironic that film is the original digital medium whilst digital camera electronics are made exclusively of analogue components. A few years ago I looked up the specification for 35mm Provia. Fuji stated that Provia contains between 26 and 28 million grains. That would give Provia a resolution of around 4 to 5 mpixels in 8 bit. However the grains also contain colour information which complicates the calculations somewhat.

[@Pozi_Drive]

The topic is clearly too difficult for you. A very good film, which Provia was not, is comparable to a 9 MP sensor. NINE megapixel. But since colour material has randomly shaped clouds of colour instead of 'grains', the MP count is probably around 4 MP. Try magnifying to 2 x 3 feet. No problem with a 12 MP sensor.

[@paulneedham9885]

@@Pozi_Drivewhy is it “clearly” too difficult for him?

[@Pozi_Drive]

@@paulneedham9885 because it is all nonsense. And I mean ALL.

[@gsum1000]

@@Pozi_Drive Your head consist of randomly shaped clouds of nonsense. Try doing a bit of research before commenting.

[@geoffreymee7671]

@@Pozi_Drive u r nothing but arrogant

[@Rich-y8n]

Thanks for attempting a brief discussion of color but I was shocked that you ONLY touched on the BAYER filter array and did not attempt ANYTHING on the Foveon sensor that was used by Sigma in their cameras. I worked with film for 30 years as well as producing prints via dye transfer, and have shot with most of the major brands (Canon, Sony, Nikon, Fujifilm) and CCD and CMOS sensors, but I am still surprised and delighted by the lovely color quality of the Foveon sensor. You should try it. Then do a review.

[@suspiciousninja1220]

does the camera body matter at all in this?

[@snapsnappist4529]

Camera manufacturers would like everyone to believe that the megapixel count is the most important spec, but in reality pretty much nobody needs as many megapixels as are available on even mid-level digital cameras. Let's not forget, the Nikon D1 was "only" 2.4 megapixels, and that was a pro model that produced results deemed good enough to publish. Resolution does not necessarily equal image quality. Sharp pictures come from focus, aperture, correct exposure and camera steadiness. Crap photos in high resolution are still crap. A while back, there was a video of article somewhere that challenged people on the street to tell the difference between prints from a high-res DSLR vs a comparatively low-res DSLR. Almost nobody could spot the difference. Ah, but what about massive prints, like the ones on billboards? You need an extra few megapixels on that as well, surely. Maybe, if you plan on looking at them from 6 inches away. At the correct viewing distance, it doesn't matter. Digital is cheaper, faster and more convenient for the likes of news and sport photographers who need their results out there quickly, and this is doubly important in the rolling-news, always-online world we now live in. Has it produced better photographs? It's subjective, but I'd say the answer is no. Does film have as many "megapixels" as digital? Probably not. Does this actually matter? No.

[@JedRothwell]

My wife needs high resolution because she takes photos of artwork and then trims the images. She may only use half of the image, depending on the shape of the artwork.

[@artberry]

@@JedRothwell Well one trick with digital cameras when photographing paintings is to photograph them in sections and knit the images together in image editing software. That way you can get much higher resolution than can be achieved with a single image.

[@JedRothwell]

@@artberry Yes. I have used that. I have an old program that does a great job of that. Unfortunately it is no longer sold. However, I have found that that the knitted (combined) images often have drop outs, blurred areas and so on, where the knitting did not work well. So I prefer a single image. Actually, my wife is the one who does this. She does cameras. I kibitz. And I use the advanced image editing software when it is needed.

[@ershenlin1774]

Historically speaking, most of the great works were done with b&w, and it remains so until this day, regardless of the development in color films and digital camera. We got many technically superb photographers (mostly in documentary and advertising), but few artistic photographers to compete with the old masters.

[@jagmarc]

More megapixals means longer time waiting

[@bunyaadi]

I remember scanning color negatives with an epson flatbed scanner accessory at 1200 dpi. The results were pretty good when printed on A4 photo paper. Although today that cost would be prohibitive.

[@ACourduff]

Interesting comparison, but it does miss one aspect. When shooting the finest grain color film (the best I ever shot with was Kodachrome 25 Daylight and Kodachrome 40 Type A, which are no longer available), you can get really detailed images when shooting on a tripod and in excellent light. But, on cloudy days, you lose that and have to shoot at wider apertures or use slow shutter speeds. Forget shooting in low light because you lose too much shadow detail. When moving up to faster films, you get increasing film grain (an effective loss in resolution). And, going to really fast color films (say at ISO 1000 or higher) you get grain structures that make modern digital sensors shooting at ISO 12,800 look really sharp.

[@ditto1958]

A lot of people these days are either too young, or if they’re old enough, they’ve forgotten. We have it MADE these days with what digital photography can do. Kodachrome was amazing (and also frustrating) and I miss it a lot. Digital gear can do things today that we never dreamed of doing in 35mm film days. Back then, if you wanted to shoot indoors with available light? Load 400 film, lens at f1.8, and 1/30 shutter speed. Brace yourself against a wall or doorway, squeeze and pray. Today? Amazing ISO capability and image stabilization make low light shooting a breeze.

[@SmallSpoonBrigade]

That's just it, the actual film is really the key to the entire question. Ideally, you'd want to do some test shots to see what SPI to use for conversion, but really, as long as you err on the high side when scanning and on the low side when printing, it's not going to be the film that's the issue.

[@rebeccaabraham8652]

I think it was an early issue of Professional Photographer - around 20+ years ago - where they tried to answer this. They used Canon EOS cameras with the same lens - and the acid test was an A3 landscape spread - as in magazine sized images. I believe they used Ektachrome 64 - and they printed the images back to back - and asked the readers to choose which one was which. At 12MP from the EOS digital - people couldn't tell them apart! It's why I feel very happy with my old Sony gear - because they exceed this level of 'quality'. Yes - I would love lot's more MP in my cameras because I enjoy working with editors on some of my images... and that makes it easier for some things although it also slows operations down - but as I'm unlikely to ever go over A3, now I'm retired, I'll save some cash by just carrying on!

[@carlosoruna7174]

Kodachrome 25 was about 25 megapixel, there were some black and white film that was enen more. used for areal photography..

[@y11971alex]

In the comment section I see people talking about using digital image correction to insert data that is not originally captured in the sensor. That is not acceptable for comparison purposes because these added or interpolated data are not captured by the sensor itself. When comparing things there has to be a solid boundary to define what are we actually comparing. Similarly digitally woven images (which consist of several exposures) cannot be compared to a single film image which is captured with a single exposure. Let us be strict about what we compare. An untouched-up film image can only be compared to the digital data directly and instantaneously captured by the digital sensor. That would be a more valid comparison between sensor and film. 😅

[@Dr.Bigglesworth]

A number of factors not discussed (meaning included in the evaluation) are film type, film ISO, development (and development technique) as well as B&W or color. In general your analysis is well done, and reasonable. My experience (as a digital imaging scientist/engineer since the late 70s) is as a general number, 40M is a good number for a very good film, with very good development in good lighting. It can go as high as 100M for very specialized films, and development process, to as low as 8M or less for some "chunky" films in low light. In reality, it's about what you are looking for. Though there are some decent digital processing filters to turn digital into having the "artistic" characteristics of different films, personally, I prefer to just shoot film (B&W), develop it, scan it at 4000DPI/5200DPI and print it on a high quality photo printer. But, that's just what works for me, as I have a film processor and shoot mostly B&W. Digital cameras have come a LONG way, and they are very very good for a very attractive price for the quality of what you get these days. If you use medium format, well, that's an entirely different ball game ;-)

[@andrewward7042]

One thing that is forgotten is that digital sensors are essentially flat. No film camera, except the Contax with a vacuum back, achieved anything close to flat in the "film" plane.

[@gregfaris6959]

But you don't mention why you feel this is important - particularly with small-format films (35mm). Many large-format cameras used vacuum backs, as departures from flatness with larger films could reach proportion that affected sharpness or geometry.

[@twoeggcups]

@@andrewward7042 I was a Contax user back in the day. Never had an RTS III but I can tell you that my Contax camera bodies did have superbly precise film transport - I always got 38 shots out of a roll.

[@dufushead]

I used to develop all my own back in the day 120, 35mm and I'd say there woud be great variation depending on the lenses, film, exposure, chemicals, cleanliness, enlarger and paper used. It's a lot easier with digital, no problems with dust and drying marks either. I do miss getting away from the rest of the world for several hours and getting lost in the darkroom though !

[@karlbrodowsky7744]

I agree with your 20..24 MPixel as approximative equivalent. And for me today digital is a good way to go. I still have analog cameras but I almost do not use them any more.

[@_Redu]

It depends on the film, the lens, your focusing abilities, your scanner and your scanning abilities. I have managed to pull ~15 Mpixels on some B/W film with my sharp Pentax lenses and my tiny Pentax ist camera. This is to say when scanned with 3200dpi and there are meaningful value changes among neighboring pixels. But it's hard to achieve such sharpness even with digital cameras. A canon 80mm f1.4 would have at max 50lp/mm (line pairs per milimeter) resolution at the center which means 100 pixels of resolution per milimeter. Assuming a 35mm film has 36x24mm dimension then "at best" we should be able to obtain 3600x2400 = 8.64Mp pixels resolution limitation originated from the lens. So there is that and it is not entirely about the film in 35mm. If you switch to medium format and use high quality lenses like 75-80lp/mm Rodenstock or Scheneider ones then you can easily achieve true 50mp on 6x4.5 format.

[@Hanneth]

The only problem with saying that the best film was 20 to 24 megapixels is that we are talking about 25 to 50 ISO pro film. Which basically no one used. Most pictures would have been taken with 200, or 400 ISO consumer film, which generally is about the equivalent of a 6.3 megapixel camera. Even at 6.3 megapixels, each grain of film was takes up about 2 pixels. Though the orientation on each grain can be quite different, and the distribution of the grains was not consistent either. As for colour reproduction, that is also very complex. Kodak film would skew more green, like digital cameras. Fuji Film would skew more blue. AGFA was just for colours all around, but would skew more yellow. Ilford was the most natural and the highest resolution for the ISO, if you could find it, and could afford it. Then get further color skewing depending on where you got your pictures developed. Kodak would be most natural. Fuji Film would skew pictures even more blue. AGFA just looked like crap no matter what film was used. Also while film had a theoretical almost infinite dynamic range, the consumer films would lose detail in bright whites, would lose any details in the darker colours, then would compress the rest of the colours into a narrow band, making it basically the equivalent of 7-bit colour. AGFA was probably more 5-bit. If you used the professional Kodak, or Ilford you could get much better colour reproduction, but at quite the price. I remember getting my Canon Rebel and how much better images it captured than my Canon Film, even though in theory, they were the same quality. So yes, the topic is complex, and continues to get even more complex. Take for instance an iPhone. All modern iPhones interpret what you seeing, and you can't turn it off. Samsung was caught on their phones replacing the actual pixels captured of the moon and replacing it with a better quality equivalent. Well iOS uses AI to process the phone photo. You never know how much of the image is what the sensor actually captured and how much of it is AI interpretation of that data. I know that if I person's face is in frame, it is going to be interpreted. This has lead to some interesting artifacts where people will end up with 3, or 4 eyes, or it has changed the person's eyes to look like someone else.

[@robhobsweden]

That’s why I scan all my negatives in at least 4800dpi (9600 for those extra precious) @ 16bit per channel. I also have a lot of 120 film from my childhood, that format is even better.

[@MikeJones-ny7yt]

Using the MTF curve for Panatomic X 35mm film, I calculated that 135 Mpix would be needed to match it. Holographic film was more like 300 Mpix.

[@davidpeters6536]

What I want to know is: 1. Why can't you set the resolution and memory (bites) size of a picture taken on an average mobile phone? 2. For "family pictures" I don't need a resolution so high I could project it onto the side of a building so why do they set it so high? 3. The memory size of a picture or video is important for saving and passing on, but I don't want to have to manually resize every picture just to send by email. Is there a shortcut?

[@CitEnthusiast]

You are not understanding the concept of digital resolution. The sensor is made up of pixels (pixel stands for "picture element"), that's a physical thing on the sensor. The lens is designed to project the image over the entire sensor. So you cannot reduce the number of pixels captured other than to manipulate the image capture itself. For example, make the family very small in the frame then crop it, and resize the result so they are seen at the size you desire. That would effectively reduce the resolution. If a manufacturer felt is was necessary they could design software that could be told to ignore a certain number of pixels (use say the center 5MP of pixels) but no one is asking for that capability.

[@deanneuburger3869]

Very interesting and important to me! Thank you!

[@johndersham1]

Please do a 4x5 and 8x10 film equivalent. I would love to hear it.

[@y11971alex]

If the film is the same, then the only difference is size. Can multiply by the differential

[@marcusoutdoors4999]

Very controversial subject, nicely handled. It’s super interesting. I’ve seen 20”x30” prints taken from ISO 100 Kodak Gold negatives back in the day look extremely sharp and I’ve handled scans from old 6x6 negatives which were amazing. The truth is they’re all good.

[@TedMishler-b6n]

32asa was the sharpest I noticed developing the stuff

[@r.markclayton4821]

Depends on the ASA of the film. I typically used 200 ASA and this gives about 12MP. Lower ASA will give higher resolution and vice versa. OTOH there aren't pixels only grains oriented randomly on the film, so you won't see pixelation, but merely be unable make out finer detail. By the time I got a Nokia N8 [phone] with a 12MP camera with decent optics, it exceeded the ability of the naked eye.

[@Yusufu-92]

Thanks for the explanations and take care of yourself.

[@lxhk3595]

So to summarise, both variants offer more than enough resolution for almost all applications. The advantages of film obviously lie elsewhere, in a certain something.

[@GuidoBatt]

No mention of the fact that the more sensitive is the 35 mm film, the less the picture is detailed; I think the max resolution you have on film, at lest commercially available, is the 64 ASA invertible (slides). It would be interesting to compare the resolution of a larger format, like 6x6 or even 6x9 cm. I believe there's no match, yet, to a digital camera. I believe the Hasselblad digital has something like 50 Mp, thus comparable to an analog 24 x 36.

[@rubenzilzer]

In film photography the film developing process also affects the resolution, different chemicals and developing times affects the grain size thus the final resolution.

[@carasau67]

My photographs taken with the Canon 1 EOS RS with a fixed mirror using Fuji Velvia are sharper and already ready compared to those taken with the Canon EOS 1D Mark IV, using the same lens. Additionally, I don’t know why, but with film, my composition always turns out perfect, it seems to capture exactly what I see to the millimeter, whereas with digital, there's always something off, even though it’s supposed to also frame 100% of the scene.

[@louisvanrijn3964]

He is right. The EKTAR 100 in an Asahi Pentax with 1.4/50 reaches that, or surpasses it. Ideal light conditions. I measured it. The lens does 120-150 lines /mm on the negative. Measured it also.