Digital BW, The Print

This speaks to something I've wondered about:  I've read in various 
places that a digital camera needs to record 12-14 Mp in order to 
exceed the information available from a 35mm negative.  Yet my own 8 
Mp camera routinely produces images which allow excellent prints at 
12 x 16, sometimes even to 18 x 24.  I could never say that about any 
of my 35mm lenses (all of which are at least 15 years old).  Some of 
this I'm sure is due to the improvement in lens quality recently, but 
is it really true film is beaten at 6 Mp?  Thanks

eric perkins 



--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, "kanefsky" 
<steve@k...> wrote:
> 
> 
> --- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, "Bob Michaels"
> <bob@b...> wrote:
> > 
> > I sent a 720 ppi file to my 1280 then resampled it to 360 and
> printed
> > it again. No difference to my naked eye, possible miniscule
> > differences with a very good loupe but it's a hard call. 
> > 
> > It was a very sharp detailed 6x7 neg scanned at 3200 ppi in a
> Minolta
> > MultiPro.
> 
> Try resampling the 360ppi image back to 720ppi and then compare them
> in Photoshop.  You may find that there's little if any difference, 
so
> you wouldn't expect to see a difference in the print either.
> 
> Film scanners scan at a much higher resolution than the resolution 
you
> can actually get out of film.   Many scanners can generate a 20
> megapixel scan from 35mm film, but in real life you can get more
> resolution out of a 6-megapixel digital SLR than from 35mm film in
> most cases.  I've done experiments where I downsampled film scans to
> 1/4 their size and back up again and found very little difference. 
> I've also upsampled 6-megapixel digital SLR files to 20 megapixel 
and
> they had more detail than the 20-megapixel film scans.
> 
> It would make more sense to try the experiement with a true 720ppi
> image from a digital SLR or with an artificially-generated
> test image that clearly had 720ppi worth of detail.
> 
> --
> Steve