It surprises me so far no one talked about the resolving power of film, and more in particular the different film formats. It's not only a question of how thick the emulsions are and what film speed you're using, but also and mainly how much detail photo optics CAN deliver to the photographic emulsion. The bigger the format, the more information you get from the emulsion for sure, but the overall sharpness goes down due to a typical bigger circle of confusion.
In this respect I think it's always wise to use the highest optical resolution your scanner is capable of when scanning small format (35 mm film), but a 4x5 inch would have very little benefit, if no benefit at all, from a 5 000 ppi scan. The only thing you would gain, is weight, but no true image detail. Even more, I think oversized images are more difficult to sharpen, as the image's grain acutance becomes more fuzzy, causing the transitional contrasts harder to be detected and isolated.
Do you agree? And what do you think a reasonable scan resolution would be for a 4x5 inch slide?
Bookmarks