Originally posted by reh321 Back in 2003 - before I ever considered digital photography - I had a professional scan some Kodachrome-25 slides - intentionally picking several photos of railroad cars with small lettering - of mine; then I set up a slide projector in a room with my computer. Every detail I could see on a slide I could also see on the corresponding 3000x2000 slide, so I concluded that the detail I was getting corresponded to about a 6mp photo. Later I purchased a used LS-2000, a 2700 ppi slide scanner made by Nikon and scanned most of the slides I had accumulated over the years; I could actually see the grain on some photos taken with cheaper or high speed film. When I got a K-30 in 2015, I took several photos with the Pentax-A 50mm f/1.7 lens I had used to take those original slides and got results even sharper than I had ever gotten with Kodachrome-25. Based on my experiences over the years, I believe film photography was not as sharp as we thought it was ….. enjoy your results as is.
So your conclusion is that a 16MP K-30 exceeds professional scans or projections from Kodachrome 25 in terms of sharpness? BTW, do you know the scanner used? I recall back in early 2000 there was a very controversial post by a professional photographer who said that his 3MP Canon D30 equaled his scans of Fuji Provia 100 scanned on Imacon scanner.
I believe what you're saying as my aforementioned acquisition of the Carson microscope was because the client couldn't believe his Kodachrome slides were not critically focused as shown by the scans from my Coolscan since he and his family has been viewing them for all those years. Disappointing I'm sure but at least the content of his pictures - family shots, transcended their technical merits.
Just to be sure, there is a difference between sharpness and detail. A good example of course is that cartoon characters are very sharp but lacks detail compared to real characters.
There are of course many facets that potentially affects detail captured on film - target detail, film type, equipment performance, conditions and critical focus. Below I show a shot taken of a target with suffciently high detail, on possibly the highest resolution film, with great care and ideal conditions. To the left bottom is the 4X4 arrangement of12233 resolution chart used as a target and above it are 100% crops of scans of the center spot using the Pentax K20D 14.6MP 4672 X 3104, Coolscan 4000dpi 5700 X 3780 and Nikon D800 36MP 7360 X 4912. You can see that although the D800 applies more pixels then the 4000dpi Coolscan, the latter still achieves a tad more detail. The big 100% crop on the right is the optical magnification of the center spot and you can clearly see the detail not achieved by these methods of scanning.
I have also conducted this test using many other films and conclude that your results from film - at least in terms of detail, will of course depend on a lot factors and scanning is only one of those. There can potentially be many weak links in the chain.
Here is a comparison 100% crop of a "real world shot" not of the same subject nor taken at the same time but very similarly - a 24MP Sony A900 @ ISO400 compared to a Coolscan scan of Fuji Sensia 400. JPEG file saved at a relatively low compression so that artifacting is not a factor even at 200% magnification. I would say the result from the shot and the scan compares very favorably.