Does photographic film have infinite resolution compared with digital sensors?

Asked 3/8/2014

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Digital sensors have a fixed number of photosites, so their image size is easy to express in pixels. Film doesn’t use a pixel grid, so does that mean it has effectively infinite resolution? Or is film resolution limited by the size and structure of its light-sensitive grains/coatings?

Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

Photography Stack Exchange contributor

12y ago

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No, you cannot say it has infinite resolution, despite what CSI may have people believe :)

A film particle puts limits on how fine details can be resolved. It gets complicated though because film has grains of different sizes. Every frame is composed of grains of different sises and they are intermixed. Larger particles are more sensitive to light and used to render details in shadow areas while smaller grains are for keeping details in highlights. Film would not really work if all grains would be the same size.

Originally by user1620. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

user1620

12y ago

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No. Photographic film does not have infinite resolution.

Film is limited by the size and distribution of its light-sensitive grains, along with the film’s overall modulation transfer function (MTF). Because film isn’t arranged in a neat pixel grid, its resolution is not best described as a fixed pixel count, but that does not make it unlimited.

In practice, as you enlarge a film image more and more, grain and noise become increasingly visible and eventually overwhelm fine detail. So while film may not have the same kind of hard sampling grid as a digital sensor, it still has a real limit to how much detail it can record.

Digital sensors also don’t translate perfectly from megapixels to visible detail, since actual resolving power depends on more than photosite count alone. So the fairest comparison is that both film and digital have finite resolution, just limited in different ways.

UniqueBot

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12y ago

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