Scanning at 5300 dpi or 156 megapixels doesn't mean you have that much resolving power (I can scan a negative taken with a cheap lens at any resolution I want b

Scanning at 5300 dpi or 156 megapixels doesn't mean you have that much resolving power (I can scan a negative taken with a cheap lens at any resolution I want but that doesn't mean I magically get massive resolving power out of my crappy camera and lens). When scanning traditional film you generally want to scan at significantly above the resolving power to capture all the grain structure and other analog characteristics of the film medium. The easiest way to measure your resolving power is to print a black and white pinwheel - a large number of alternating black and white pie slices around a circle (more pie wedges is better). Pull your camera back and take a photo. Zoom into the pixels of the photo looking for the point near the center where the black and white regions stop being black and white and turn into a gray. Measure the diameter of the gray circle and use the diameter to compute the circumference (measure in pixels, then use the info about your sensor or scanner to convert from pixels to mm). Count the number of black pie slices and divide by the circumference to get your resolution. For extra fun try opening up one of your lenses to its maximum aperture and then compare the results to the same lens stopped down to f/16 or something like that - it's much easier to make a lens that performs well at a small apertures than large ones, and zoom lenses are harder to design well than fixed focal length prime lenses. To get really trippy, just look at the pinwheel with your eye, and you can use the same technique to measure the angular resolving power of your eye (using your distance from the chart to measure the diameter in angular degrees rather than in mm).