[filmscanners] Re: Pixels and Prints

["" <derek_c@cix.co.uk>]

This didn't start out as a film vs digital comparison but a scanned film
vs digital one.

So both images have hard pixels.


In article <3F978C9E.90907@shaw.ca>, artistic-1@shaw.ca (Arthur Entlich)
wrote:

>
>
> David J. Littleboy wrote:
>
>
> > The question is what the cutoff point is. It looks to me that 35mm
> > film is
> > worth about 9MP, not 24MP. Most people comparing the 1Ds to 35mm film
> > find
> > the 1Ds winning hands down. There is a question as to how much more
> > information a 5080 dpi scanner gets out of a 35mm frame than a 4000
> > dpi
> > scanner. I suspect that it's not enough of a difference to be
> > significant.
> > (None of the Minolta 5400 scans of actual images I've seen showed
> > significant improvement over 4000 dpi scans, although the test chart
> > images
> > look a lot better.)
> >
> > David J. Littleboy
> > davidjl@gol.com
> > Tokyo, Japan
> >
>
> I think this is probably true, due to the "cutoff" of the human eye and
> brain.  Basically, for the size of prints most people produce, there
> probably isn't much to be gained by going above 4000 ppi scans, although
> I can see what's missing in a 4000 ppi scan versus the original image
> looked over with a loupe.
>
> However, I'd like to see what happens with a four foot wide poster print
> from a 35mm film scan (with a drum scanner) and a 9 MP digital image.
>
> The problem with the digicam image is that at the point that pixels
> become visible, then our eye starts to object due to the recognizable
> sharp and gridlike pixel edges.  At that point, film grain (dye clouds)
> becomes more acceptable, because it is analog (random placement, size
> and overlap) which our eyes find more pleasing. Our world is full of
> analog visual "noise", even our eyes produce it, so we learn to ignore
> it, but sharp edged square cornered patches of color are pretty obvious
> to us.  It is the reason camouflage works so well, our eyes and brain
> don't register ill-defined edges of similar colors well.
>
> Art

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