Just discovered Straight Dope today… I’ve been looking through the articles, and may have a few comments!
On this one, I thought I could shed a little more light (as one of the people who work on the CGI in the afformentioned "computer graphics extravaganza"s…)
when we get film (the actual film strips) delivered, we scan them in.
35mm film is usuall scanned at what we call 2k - 2048x1556 pixels. This is high enough resolution to keep the grain detail in the original film.
Some people prefer to work at 4k (4096x3112), because they feel that it retains more detail. It does, but, personally, I’m not sure it’s worth the extra pain of working with 4x the image data.
70mm film would usually be worked at either 4k or 8k (8192x6224)
I’ve always wondered that myself, but in the context of surviellance photos. I think the conventional wisdom is that satellites can read a newspaper headline, from space. I wonder just how well the guvmint can see it. Can they actually read the text of the newspaper? I’ve always assumed that the convential wisdom was still FAR surpassed by what they could see, top secret of course…
But that is aside from pixels, I guess. Yes, they can probably see the headline, probably more. But they can probably see only the headline. A VERY narrow field of vision. So, while they might see great detail, the resolution, the actual size of the pic, the number of pixels, might be quite ordinary.
As the for resolution of photo film, wouldn’t it come down to the atomic level? Photons strike the atoms in the film chemical and they store the information.
So the limit as to how much detail you could transfer to your system would depend on your scanning equipment. With enough detail on the scanner you’d be able to get billions, or more, of distinct pixels.
The details of the traditional photographic process are complex (hellishly complex in some color processes), but what it comes down to is silver crystals settling out. And, as a rule, the smaller the crystals, the less sensitive the film.
Modern top-of-the-line mainstream digital cameras give approximately the same detail as 35mm film, and the new Hasselblad H3D is comparable to 120/220 film. Film still gives more detail in 4x5 or 8x10, but it’s only a matter of time; film has been pushed to about the theoretical limit, whereas digital still has a long way to go. (And, unless you’re a professional studio photographer, what was the last time you saw a 4x5 or 8x10 camera? I haven’t personally seen one of either since the early 60’s.)
I agree. Even my 4MP camera and $129 bubble jet printer produced 4x6 colour prints which fooled people 100% of the time when I asked them to guess “which one was from film and my home printer, and which from digital with photo processing?” I imagine my new 10.1MP camera my girlfriend bought me would do even better even up to letter-sized prints.
I do however appreciate the OP starting this thread to share his personal experience with typical scanning levels for the 35mm film. It would be interesting to know at what level of scanning it’s indistinguishable between digital and film in his work. I mean, I know he said that “2k” kept the grain detail, but could it go less than that and be essentially perfect, or is there still a difference seen even up to “4k”?
Interesting, my Dad is a budding amateur photographer and he too reckoned that effectively a “chemical” photograph has something like infinite resolution in comparison to a digital snap because everything happened at the atomic level. And then of course his own digital camera is of a high enough resolution for this to be a moot point.
I’ve heard it said that standard photographic film is about 5000 dpi. Standard 35mm film is 36mmx24mm, so you could get a theoretical image of about 6800x4600 pixels. I’m not sure how accurate that 5000 dpi figure is, though.