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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 o

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).

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).