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As someone who sometimes shoots medium format film, sometimes shoots digital—I am a bit skeptical about claims that digital “easily beat the resolution of class

As someone who sometimes shoots medium format film, sometimes shoots digital—I am a bit skeptical about claims that digital “easily beat the resolution of classical medium format film”. I shoot with a nice, but old, MF camera and prime lens on a tripod and then do wet prints (usually) or drum scans (rarely). Based on close examination of drum scans, I estimate my setup gives images of around 60-80 megapixels. Knock that down somewhat for color. This is a bit lower than the quoted resolution for the film I use, if you read the spec sheet. Rough comparison of digital vs film leads me to conclude that you can’t just compare the camera resolution against the film scan resolution. Maybe it’s the low-pass filter / Bayer filter, but a film scan will have the same image quality as a raw digital photo of somewhat larger size (say, 50%). So if you take a high-end full-frame digital camera with a 24x36mm sensor, you get 50 megapixels, and my film setup will get you around the same number of pixels when shooting color, but the film scans will be sharper. The film is 4x the area—56x70mm. So it’s close, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a top-of-the-line full-frame digital camera could beat a 645. But 645 is the smallest of the medium format sizes, and digital wouldn’t be beating it by a huge margin. It’s a bit subjective, because the transfer functions for digital and film are so different and there’s no obvious correct way to compare them mathematically. That said, digital will easily win at higher ISOs.

leemailll 6y ago
I suspect when people compare digital against film, they often mean the 35mm film or aps size, not something like medium format or larger. Of course, there is hasselblad medium-size digital back, but it is not often seen.
- klodolph 6y ago
  The parent comment explicitly mentioned medium-format. The point when digital became competitive with medium-format was an important milestone--it's just that if you did events, sports, wildlife, or photojournalism you were probably already on digital.
jrockway 6y ago
My experience mirrors yours. 50MP off of medium format and a flatbed scanner is easy. 1980s lenses look great, even with color film. I have one shot I took off the roof of a building, and you can read street signs many blocks away in the final scan. With 4x5, 100MP is pretty achievable, and even with very "inferior" lenses, the resolution is incredible. I have a picture of the Manhattan Bridge from the Brooklyn side, with the main focus being the bridge... but if you zoom in on the background, you can again read street signs. I love this kind of photo, where you can blow it up to wall size and think "nice" but walk closer and uncover tons of details that you could never see in person. It impresses me every time. Digital is in an awkward spot where semiconductor yields make larger sensors impractical, so they have to focus on hyper-optimizing lenses. This ends up being very expensive. And, there are diminishing returns; the wave nature of light introduces interesting artifacts the smaller your pixels get, so there is unfortunately a hard limit. Compare this to a big piece of plastic dipped in some chemicals, and you wonder how much we really benefited from the switch to digital. It's great for the snapshot market, it's great for people that need to produce 1000s of wall-sized photos a day, but for the large middle ground, it feels like technology for technology's sake. (I of course own a DSLR, being very into technology for technology's sake!)
- wyager 6y ago
  > the wave nature of light introduces interesting artifacts the smaller your pixels get The particle nature as well. Because light arrival is a poisson process, your pixels need to be big enough that their “backing capacitor”, so to speak, can fit at least a few tens of thousands of electrons for acceptable noise levels. If your pixel capacitor maxes out at 100 electrons, your SNR will never exceed 10, even under optimal conditions (or, at least, you have to downscale, and then you would be better off with bigger pixels in the first place).

leemailll 6y ago

I suspect when people compare digital against film, they often mean the 35mm film or aps size, not something like medium format or larger. Of course, there is hasselblad medium-size digital back, but it is not often seen.

klodolph 6y ago
The parent comment explicitly mentioned medium-format. The point when digital became competitive with medium-format was an important milestone--it's just that if you did events, sports, wildlife, or photojournalism you were probably already on digital.

jrockway 6y ago

My experience mirrors yours. 50MP off of medium format and a flatbed scanner is easy. 1980s lenses look great, even with color film. I have one shot I took off the roof of a building, and you can read street signs many blocks away in the final scan. With 4x5, 100MP is pretty achievable, and even with very "inferior" lenses, the resolution is incredible. I have a picture of the Manhattan Bridge from the Brooklyn side, with the main focus being the bridge... but if you zoom in on the background, you can again read street signs. I love this kind of photo, where you can blow it up to wall size and think "nice" but walk closer and uncover tons of details that you could never see in person. It impresses me every time. Digital is in an awkward spot where semiconductor yields make larger sensors impractical, so they have to focus on hyper-optimizing lenses. This ends up being very expensive. And, there are diminishing returns; the wave nature of light introduces interesting artifacts the smaller your pixels get, so there is unfortunately a hard limit. Compare this to a big piece of plastic dipped in some chemicals, and you wonder how much we really benefited from the switch to digital. It's great for the snapshot market, it's great for people that need to produce 1000s of wall-sized photos a day, but for the large middle ground, it feels like technology for technology's sake. (I of course own a DSLR, being very into technology for technology's sake!)

wyager 6y ago
> the wave nature of light introduces interesting artifacts the smaller your pixels get The particle nature as well. Because light arrival is a poisson process, your pixels need to be big enough that their “backing capacitor”, so to speak, can fit at least a few tens of thousands of electrons for acceptable noise levels. If your pixel capacitor maxes out at 100 electrons, your SNR will never exceed 10, even under optimal conditions (or, at least, you have to downscale, and then you would be better off with bigger pixels in the first place).