> I've read that the nominal PVD is 10" because that's where the human eye can resolve the most detail.
The young human eye. As most of us age, that distance moves out and our ability to see detail diminishes unless we put on our reading glasses, but then those shift our relationship to the image.
> This phenomenon may be familiar to people who have done some house painting.
There was a yellow green that looked pastel on the chip and looked like the inside of tropical fruit on the wall - I was not even allowed to rest before being sent to the paint store for replacement paint.:-)
Bruce has identified one of the things that was bothering my about my B&W - the relative contrast seems to change as the print gets larger. I would add that little black areas become big black areas and that sometimes requires opening them up. Some of this would go unnoticed in the darkroom because you would correct it as you looked for the new exposure value. In digital you can do exactly the same thing, only larger, so you see some things that you not otherwise see.
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