Simplicius wrote:Bumping this to AMP.
YT300000 wrote:Well 35 mm film stock is the equivalent of 15/16 megapixels, but who's counting anyways?
That's only an optimal figure, though, using a fine-grained film, good lenses, etc. You could probably exceed it by a small factor with something like Kodachrome 25, assuming you could get it.
Or Velvia 50/100, which you can get, easily. Provia 100 is not too far behind either. You also can exceed it quite handsomely by using slow B&W film. Kodak Tech Pan would be the "difficult to get" example, Rollei ATP 1.1 or Adox CMS the easier to get examples, from Germany of course. Adox CMS is made by Agfa, by the way. Not the dead German AgfaPhoto but the very much alive Belgian Agfa-Gevaert. They just don't sell films for consumers and instead sell it to Fotoimpex in Germany, the owner of the Adox brand. It was developed for aerial photography and it's still used for that.
It is perhaps telling that with those films the diffraction limit is somewhere about F/4. It means that only the best of lenses are good enough to be used with them, if you want maximum resolution, considering that most lenses don't reach their best resolving power until F/5.6 or F/8. The only catch with those slow B&W films is that they really are quite slow by modern standards, typically exposed at EI 32 or less.
Simplicius wrote:
Conversely, a good exposure with good lenses on ASA 400 film is probably about half that figure, based on my own haphazard test.
Would again depend on the film. Provia 400X will give you significantly more resolution than a consumer ISO 400 color negative. Professional ISO 400 color negatives would be somewhere in between. But in general the resolution would be much less than on ISO 100 films, of course.
Simplicius wrote:
Megapixel resolution as a means of comparing film and digital is basically a penis-measuring contest between fanboys, though, since absolute resolution only determines the degree of enlargement possible, and the size of the final print is a presentation decision alongside matting and framing; not every photo is best displayed at maximum enlargement.
Yes, it's basically all just measurberation. You are forgetting one thing about maximum enlargement size though: granularity ("grain"). Digital images from DLSRs typically have very little noise compared to the granularity of film, which makes bigger enlargements from digital possible without the noise being intrusive. That's the main reason why the majority of people think that digital is better. Subjective image quality has very little to do with resolution and a lot to do with noise/grain.
Simplicius wrote:
But LOL@you for taking seriously a sentence containing the phrase "analog photography."
I prefer "film photography" or "chemical photography" over "analog photography", unless you really mean strictly analog workflow by the that. Most people use a hybrid workflow (
i.e. scanning the film) , even when they talk about "analog photography". Not the people at
APUG though; when they say analog, they really mean it.
Simplicius wrote:
Phantasee wrote:what is a bokeh?
It's the term for the effect of an unfocused lens at wide apertures, for instance the background of Death's tomato photo in the photo-a-day thread. I think it's wanked a bit as an artistic quality, and it's not good as a subject in and of itself, but it remains true that some lenses look better when wide open than others do.
Bokeh can be important in some cases, but without the Japanese we would not have a word for it and probably only a particularly bad bokeh would invite attention. It pretty much used to be that way until the 1990s. Bokeh was rarely tested in non-Japanese lens tests before that, although the testers might make a note of very bad looking out-of-focus areas.