Peter Figen
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 p.4 #5 · PLEASE Convince me about film ... | |
I'm going to post one image and a 100 percent crop from the same image. Now, you have to keep in mind that this was shot on a roll of PKM25 that was twenty years expired and had lost some speed, but not any color, and it was shot with a Canon 35mm 1.4 at f/2, which is not the sharpest aperture, but still pretty damned good. The first shot shows the full frame and the detail is a 100 percent crop of the 8000 ppi Howtek drum scan. While there is some film grain, it's not objectionable, but the overall detail is amazing, and when you see the 40 inch wide test print here, you, too, will be a believer. I've shot similar images with a 1DsMKIII and, while they are relatively grainless by comparison, they are not any sharper.
In addition, and I have no way to show you here, I've done quite a bit of testing using 35mm film compared to Canon digital. A few years ago, I shot a controlled outdoor setting outside my studio with a 200mm 1.8 @f4,and scanned that Velvia at 8000 ppi on the Howtek. It was very very sharp, with more detail than you could imagine from a 35mm frame. The problem was, that, even with an 8000 ppi drum scan, which means that you're scanning through an aperture of 3.17 microns, there was even more detail visible on the film when viewing a high magnification section directly off the film. There was detail visible on the film that could not be resolved even by an 8000 ppi drum scan. I was amazed at that and you're going to have to take my word on it.
There's so much more to image quality than resolution alone, but, if you're using the best film, lenses, shooting techniques and scanner, the resolution equivalency is a lot higher than you think.
I've also done the same shot (as close as possible) with a three stitch pan on a 1DsMKIII and a 24mm T/SII, shot vertically and stitched left, right and center, compared to a Mamiya 7 43mm with T-Max100 scanned at 4000. Very similar looks to them detail-wise, which puts the 6x7 in the 40 mp range equivalent. The film still looks better to me overall, but that is subjective.
Gee Rabe - Kodachrome 25 Exp. 1991
8000 ppi detail unsharpened, straight off the scanner
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