Enlargement of Digital and Film Photos

To see how much difference there is, we need to enlarge the images. I have enlarged these examples to display the actual original pixels of the digital image. The film example shows the same portion of the image, but it is resized to have only 25% of it's original pixels to match the size of the digital image. The digital image is 627 pixels wide and 464 pixels high. The film based image is 634 pixels wide and 431 pixels high. Each of the digital image pixels is the original from the photo as taken. The film pixels each represent 4 pixels in the original scan. In size, these images represent a section of a photo from the last page blown up to a little larger than 16 inches by 20 inches.

Digital Photo

35mm Film Photo

At first glance, you might think the digital photo is actually sharper. As we will see in a moment, that isn't the case. However, both are very sharp and the higher contrast of the digital image gives it the appearance of higher sharpness. Now, again, there is a difference between an 80 dpi screen display and a 1200 dpi print, but at any normal viewing distance, no one will see more detail than shows up at 80 dpi.

Clearly, both of these images are quite sharp. Conventional wisdom is that a 16 x 20 inch print is a stretch for 35 mm let alone a 3 megapixel digital, but both of these images would make acceptable large prints. Obviously, an 8 x 10 inch print from the digital would be essentially equal to the film version.

 

Next: Maximum Enlargement Examples

 

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