I’ve been thinking...

Stop giggling at the back - I do have a think occasionally. Usually in bed as I’m trying to get to sleep. You know, the usual things - domestic arrangements, the plot holes in something I’ve just watched on TV, graph theory - that class of thing.

Anyway, I was thinking about digital versus film photography. What follows is probably not original (neither was the graph theory), but here we go.

Assuming an image that is properly exposed, in focus and so on...

With film, all the information is present on a piece of plastic about 1 by 1½ inches. Or 2¼ square or 6x7 or whatever your preference is. No matter. When you enlarge it, the details present just get bigger. If you enlarge it too far, they will get fuzzy (cf Blow-Up) but will still be there. If you use a particularly fine grained film, you have a bigger possible range of enlargement.

With digital, for the sake of argument a 4000 by 2600 pixel image, unless you print it to (assuming 250dpi, for convenience in calculating) at least 16 by 10½ inches (approx) then the software/printer is going to have to do some clever work resizing the image - merging/averaging pixels etc - to make it fit. Which means you lose detail. The smaller the print, the more you lose.

So, up to a certain size of print/display, film is better (in at least one aspect) than digital. Above that size, I guess they are pretty equal.

Unless one starts to consider the effect of the size of the grain of the film not matching the size of the grain of the photographic paper. Or the optimal viewing distance, which (if I remember correctly) depends on the focal length of the lens used. And probably other factors, too...

See, I told you it probably wasn’t original.