35mm Curiosity

[Zeeke]

Ok, so while minding my own business and dealing with LOZ"s rantings and ravings about what bream eat and shit we decided to talk photography

If.. 35mm film could be measured by megapixels.. what would it be??

Curious and look forward to seeing your answers


Tim

[LOZ]

[MattC]

I have seen all sorts of claims on megapixels - everything from 6MP to 60MP.

A couple of months back I read an article about scanning film which touched on film resolution and digital resolution. IIRC, film grain size of the finest colour films is somewhere around 9 microns vs something like 5.5 for the D2X which would put the film at something like 24MP (no, I did not pull the calculator out, just guesstimating). It was an interesting read and I wish that I could find the link. I thought that I had it bookmarked.

Cheers PS. What do bream eat????

[Oneputt]

Matt almost anything

[gstark]

Tim,

Which film?



Basically, today's high end cameras are considered to be roughly equivalent to film, but it's an irrelevant measurement.

The real measurement is the quality of the images made, which is a measurement of the quality of the photographer.

[Zeeke]

Dunno Gary, ask LOZ, he was the genius who came up with the idea, he said i was enough of a postwhore, i should post the question

But i'll agree with your comments

The real measurement is the quality of the images made, which is a measurement of the quality of the photographer.

and Matt, thanks for the guesstimate, bit of thinking to do there!

Tim

[Hlop]

I don't think that megapixels count is a proper thing to compare. Or let me put it this way, it isn't only thing you have to compare. Things I like about colour and especially B&W negatives are dynamic range and exposure tollerance

[Nnnnsic]

Plus, you get real grain.

I mean, you could take some 1600 ISO and push it to over 20" x 24" but still, you could take some 200 ISO and push it to an A2 or possibly A1 size and provided they're correctly exposed, neither will look like exactly like crap.

Now under those situations, the 1600 would be consider 6-8 megapixel before interpolation and the 200 would be considered around 16 megapixel.

It really depends on what you've done with the film, how it was shot, what sort of film it is, etc.

[CraigVTR]

The real measurement is the quality of the images made, which is a measurement of the quality of the photographer.

Gary do you have to be so sensible. If my other half saw this comment I would never have an excuse for buying a better/new camera. Just remembered, all my cash (for the next 10 years) has been spent on my upcoming holiday.
Craig

[gstark]

The real measurement is the quality of the images made, which is a measurement of the quality of the photographer.

Gary do you have to be so sensible. If my other half saw this comment I would never have an excuse for buying a better/new camera.

Craig,

That is an entirely different question altogether.

Who needs an excuse to buy a new body? Surely I want it is good enough?

[CraigVTR]

The real measurement is the quality of the images made, which is a measurement of the quality of the photographer.

Gary do you have to be so sensible. If my other half saw this comment I would never have an excuse for buying a better/new camera.

Craig,

That is an entirely different question altogether.

Who needs an excuse to buy a new body? Surely I want it is good enough?

Nowadays 'I want' only works when I lay on the floor kicking and screaming. She already reckons Iam the fourth kid in the house.
Craig

[gstark]

Nowadays 'I want' only works when I lay on the floor kicking and screaming.

And your point is ?

[CraigVTR]

[LOZ]

And the answer is

http://clarkvision.com/imagedetail/film ... tal.1.html

And Kens answer is

http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/filmdig.htm
and another one here

http://www.normankoren.com/Tutorials/MTF7A.html PS to Tim
I think we should stick to fishing !! LOZ

[Zeeke]

I think so Loz, its all your fault still

some good reading tho, thanks

Tim

[moz]

If.. 35mm film could be measured by megapixels.. what would it be??

I did some experiements involving a (boring but challenging) test shot taken with both a 300D and a similar Canon film camera with a variety of films, from the $5 bargin bin at Fletchers to 100 ISO velvia. Those I scanned to about 12MP, then ran noise reduction and both shrank them to 6MP and uprezzed the 300D shots to 12MP. I decided that the 300D was a bargain since it cost about the same as buying and devloping 60 rolls of Velvia but the shots were comparable. Where Velvia was better I can usually kick the digital camera over 20Mp by tiling images. The fine print was different, sure, but overall I decided that cheap film is a bit like PoS digitcams - it takes photos but it's limited. Expensive film just irritated me a great deal because the results were so mediocre - sometimes better than the 300D, sometimes worse, but there are trivially few places I shoot that the difference would be noticable on an A4 or 10x8 print. So I got a couple of frames scanned professionally, and they seemed happy with them. Which means that at least someone was, because I thought my borrowed film scanner did a better job.

My conclusion: if noise is important, or ISO over 100, forget 35mm film. If cost or speed is important, ditto. If resolution or large prints matter, use large format or at a pinch, medium format.

[Dug]

Tim do you want to borrow the F5 for a while?