What was the resolution of film?
Also it depends on the film as they are all different. The lower the ISO the higher the resolution. This is due to the fact that the grain can be very fine since it is for a high light environment. When you go to higher ISO films over say 400 the grain gets more coarse, or larger to accept less light.
Joves wrote:
Pettigrew wrote: Wiki offers a pretty good write up on this topic as well - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_versus_film_photography
But Wiki, or the authors are incorrectly equating the film sizes in the resolution with MPs, over DPI. They are giving the 4x5, and larger films some outrageous numbers that are not even close. This is because with the film it is not the size that decides the resolution, unlike digital, but the fineness of the grain, or DPI. In which case digital sensors out resolve film. The only reason that you could print larger photos with Medium Format was the size of the negative, the resolution of the final image was again affected by the grain of the film itself. A digital sensor is always at a constant, unless you use a cropped lens on a Full Frame camera that allows it, so the more MPs the larger the data file, and the better the resolution for printing.
It's apples and oranges. A digital file has a specific number of pixels, resulting from a sensor with a specific number of photo sites, and therefore has a resolution that can be expressed in ppi. Film has a continuous emulsion. With lower sensitivity film, such as 25 or 32, that emulsion would have a very fine grain. At higher sensitivity, such as 400, the emulsion would have more grain. Push that 400 film to 1600 and you get even bigger grain. None of that equates to resolution. As Dennis said, the size of the negative (or transparency) does come into play. An enlargement to a given size from a 35mm is going to show more grain than the same size printed from a 2-1/4 square, and a lot more than the same size printed from a 4x5.
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