Film is very low-res stuff compared to digital...accept it film fanboys.

[Daniel D. Teoli Jr.]

Flatbed scanned 35mm negative film is about equal to a 3 or 4 mp digital P&S camera...that is it. I'm sure the film fanboys will not agree. But put up or shut up fanboys. I don't pull this stuff out of my ass, as the kids like to say. I shot film for 3 decades starting in 1969 and digital from just before 2000. I also work extensively with film in the Archive. But more important than that, I test and test. My ego does not say...the tests say.

Here is a minuscule recreation of some of the 'film vs digital' tests I had done many years ago. Tumblr deleted all my websites in 2019, so the material is all lost. But luckily, I had it on optical disc with the tests, as it was deleted a long ago from my drives. 

I didn't test any chrome films. Someone else will have to do that. Being a documentary photographer, I pretty much used negative film because it has more forgiving exposure latitude when grabbing fast shots on the street or available light photography. Most of my work was with Tri-X, Plus-X, Ilford FP4, HP5. Once in a while I'd shoot some Panatomic-X.

Two Blind Beggars Hollywood, CA. 1972 - D.D.Teoli Jr.

When you are doing fast, candid work you have no time for exposure meters. You guesstimate and shoot. That is not a good formula for shooting chromes. Whether film is not as sharp as digital does not matter that much...unless you demand maximum sharpness. For film has a certain character that is hard to reproduce with digital. You can use all the digital grain you like in post...but it is not organic and does not look the same as film. But you can come close sometimes. So, film and digital both have their pro and con qualities. 

Here are a few of the tests comparing Epson flatbed scanned 35mm film to digital. I've shown the full image taken with a crop sensor 6.1mp camera. A few of the close ups will follow. To see them all go to the link below. The film may have come out slightly better with a drum scan, but a better scan just shows the grain sharper...it does not magically make the film super sharp unless the sharpness is there. These tests were done with what the average prosumer person may use, as most people don't have a drum scanner. All tests were done with a tripod.

 

Epson R-D1s 6.1mp Zeiss 35mm f2

Epson R-D1s 6.1mp Zeiss 35mm f2 cropped

Kodak Easyshare C653 6.1mp P&S cropped

Leica M8 Kodak Ektar 100 film Zeiss 50mm f2 cropped

Leica M8 Tri-X film Zeiss 50mm f2 cropped

(Note: This scan was done by a professional photo processing service and is a sample of the type of scan they give you when they develop your film.)

Leica M240 24mp Zeiss 50mm f2 cropped

I put a handful of the test photos at this link. I had hundreds of tests at the Tumblr covering close up, medium and long-distance comparisons. They all showed the same results...film is pretty low res stuff. 

Sample images from 'Camera Comparisons' website deleted by Tumblr D.D.Teoli Jr. : D.D.Teoli Jr. : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Here is an interesting timeline of Kodak film...

History of Film | Kodak

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Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Archival Collection
Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Small Gauge Film Archive
Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Advertising Archive
Daniel D. Teoli Jr. VHS Video Archive
Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Popular Culture Archive
Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Audio Archive
Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Social Documentary Photography

Edited April 12 by Daniel D. Teoli Jr.

[Simon Wyss]

There’s that image with the German Wikipedia page for the Bell & Howell Company:

I took it in 2006. It’s from a set of CIRCUS, a silent picture made then. Olympus Pen-F, Gigabitfilm 40, proprietary developer from the Gigabitfilm enterprise.

Here is the full image:

The negative size is 18 × 24 mm. I scanned an enlargement on RC photo paper, a little smaller than 18 × 24 cm at 300 DPI.

Another cutout from the same enlargement, scanned at 600 DPI:

This is a tad bigger than three by three millimetres of the negative. One can see well the scale of the footage counter and the one for the shutter times. There is still a lot more on the negative. The enlargement was not made with special care.

I don’t know what you’re talking about.

[David Sekanina]

Junior is just trolling again Simon 🙂

 

Edited April 13 by David Sekanina

[Jon O'Brien]

Definition is one thing. But another aspect worth mentioning is that a lot of digital 'fanpeople' remind me of an old guy standing in an art show, looking at two paintings side by side. He doesn't like the painting on the left. He thinks it's low quality. He likes the uninspiring but superficially impressive work to its right, that looks exactly like ten thousand other paintings you always see at such exhibitions. But the painting on the left is art. He walks up closely to both the paintings, less than two feet away from them, and points from one to the other, looking back at his wife with an intensity of conviction. He points to the painting on the right. "Look at that artisty -- the painter has painted every single leaf accurately. This painting on the left has none of that fine control of the brush!! He's an amateur!" He steps back, looks again at both paintings to compare them one last time, and he and his wife walk off. But an observer, quietly standing nearby and having overheard the conversation, sees things very differently. To him, the painting on the right is commercial looking, run of the mill muck, churned out easily in a tired, tried and true production style, and the other is real art -- something that stands out, and will always stand out. To each his own.

[Samuel Preston]

On 4/12/2024 at 6:50 PM, Daniel D. Teoli Jr. said:

Leica M8 Kodak Ektar 100 film Zeiss 50mm f2 cropped

Leica M8 Tri-X film Zeiss 50mm f2 cropped

Leica M8 is a digital camera, I owned one. So no idea how the hell you’re shooting tri-x and ektar on it 😉 

[Tyler Purcell]

I'm sorry, you do not have the proper instruments. 

You would first need a very good and high resolution lens, which could go between two different cameras of the same style. We used Canon EOS-1 camera and Canon R5 camera for our test. 

Next, you need to use fine grain stocks. I prefer shooting on Ektar 100 for these tests. Even though it's a bit cheating since the digital imager likes to be around 640 iso (native). If you're working on resolution tests, you want the finest grain film stock possible. 

The actual test would be a chart. We have a digital imager resolution chart that's 8ft wide and 6ft tall. It has resolution lines on it. You measure resolution through MTF and you can also do it visually, but only if your scan is high enough res. 

Flatbed scanners are the absolute worst way to scan film, 100% useless. First off, 6MP is horrible resolution, you're basically talking about a slightly larger scan than 2k. Second, they do not have accurate focus tools. They have a fixed focus range and they only know how to scan things at the level of the glass. A real film scanner, has focusing tools, which allow you to focus the image properly. The other thing, is that a real scanner will hold the film very flat. This is a critical aspect that flatbeds don't do for the most part. So we have a few methods of scanning. One of them is a 10k drum scanner system. Another is using a DSLR. The fun thing is to actually build a diffused light source and a little system for your DSLR to capture the stills. We have gotten pretty good results using that and our friends Sony 6k (18MP) DSLR. He has a very nice light source. 

On our initial tests using this method (this is our second attempt to do a resolution comparison test since we've acquired an 8k (28MP) stills camera), using the Sony 6k (18MP) imager to capture the 35mm stills from, we saw the R5 be a bit sharper with slightly more detail using the same 70-200 Canon L series EF mount lens. The film was clearly more noisy/grainy and the lines on the chart lost detail around 3 lines earlier than the R5. This was to be expected however, the R5 is a TRUE 8k imager and our 6k scans are not quite 6k, more like 5600x4000, in that range. So of course, the film scans would simply be softer and they were. The grain was punctuated very much throughout the chart and the main reason we saw no more detail, was due to the grain. Nowhere was the image "soft" like it was lacking resolution. 

The reason I haven't published this test, is because my end game would be to get the 35mm stills, scanned at 10k on a drum scanner. This is truly the only way to really get the right information we need to prove results. I have just been too busy to deal with one more camera test that nobody will ever really watch. So someday I will get around to it and publish my results, but suffice to say, seeing other peoples test results, the 35mm will never reach the sharpness of the 8k (28MP) R5. However, the R5 will never remotely get close to the color science of film. I have been beyond disappointed in the R5's color science, it's nothing like the older DSLR's like the 5DMKIII, which has one of the best color sciences of any camera I've ever used. The R5 just delivers horrible images from the camera, you have to throw it in Lightroom to get them working, almost like adding a LUT to a Digital Cinema Camera. Where the film scans, I get back and don't have to do anything.

In the end, film has a certain quality that digital doesn't appear to even attempt to emulate, like you see in the cinema world. What keeps me shooting film is that aspect AND the longevity of the negatives. Digital seems so temporary, almost like you do all that work and it only takes a hard drive to fail suddenly it's like you never even shot anything. Meanwhile a vault in our storage room, contains tens of thousands of feet of film, that will last 100 years without question. Will anyone care in 100 years? Who knows. 

Edit: Our 16mm film scans are 4k (12MP), you aren't even working at that resolution. 

Edited April 15 by Tyler Purcell

[Tyler Purcell]

For the record, here is by far the most difficult thing for film to do. 

R5 8k (28MP) at 800 ISO and Gold 800 35mm film scanned at 6k (18MP). Sadly, two different lenses. The R5 was a 24-105 RF and the 35mm was a 24-70 EF. However, you can clearly see the R5 is a winner in the res department, but at 5x zoom, the only thing holding back the film is the grain. 

R5 reference image: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/pozghhox2xrrslw5gmo2k/481-Depot-R5.jpg?rlkey=6ror9pkh89cljccj5zx9jm23q&dl=0

35mm reference image: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/xeynb9mcpcyg0pluw1icu/481-Depot-Gold-800.jpg?rlkey=p1yfdbbeqrbqjfeuzfcvatxo6&dl=0