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Comment by germinalphrase | Hacker News Reader

My father was a commercial photographer and graphic designer. I grew up with a darkroom in my basement and spent a great deal of time taking, developing, and printing photographs with various types of vintage equipment. I even spent my 20’s doing camerawork on feature films, commercials, music videos, etc when a lot of that work was still shot on Super 16.

Chemical photography was a beautiful, mysterious and physical process. I tried making the jump to digital - but… it had just lost its magic for me. Now, I just take snapshots on my phone like everyone else. They’re pretty good.

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Chemical photography still has a lot of magic. Holding a developed photo in your hand is very visceral and satisfying compared to scrolling through hundreds on your phone.

I've started ordering prints (Fuji prints directly and the colors are fab) regularly and I'm considering buying a printer, mostly to try and scratch the same itch (I can't justify the space for a darkroom at the moment). If your snapshots are good, give it a go, you may be pleasantly surprised.

This doesn't just apply to film photography. I own a small photo printer (a Canon Selphy) for printing 4"x6" high quality prints, and it's astonishing how much more engaging it is to hold a physical print or flip through a photo book, even if they're digital shots.

I find a big iPad Pro comes pretty close to the same effect.

Which model, if I may ask?

I have a CP1300. The modern replacement is a CP1500. They’re much of a muchness.

Doesn't celluloid still have more resolution? See eg. the recent Oppenheimer release on 70mm film.

35mm film is equivalent to about 21MP.

https://api.filmfix.com/blog.asp?post=599

It's complicated, and there's no single way to answer that question.

The shortest answer is that inch for inch, high-megapixel digital sensors have higher resolution than film, especially when measuring luminance only.

The longer answer is that those sensors are incredibly expensive and lose some degree of spacial resolution when it comes to colour data specifically, due to having to use a colour filter array over an inherently monochrome sensor and then de-mosaicing the result into a colour image. There's also the tradeoff for film ISO versus grain size, which (mostly, in a lies-to-children kind of way) means that the gap between film & digital increases as the amount of available light goes down.

Of course, you can also use an 8"x10" large format film camera to capture an effective 600 megapixel image, which digital cannot compete with.

There's about 9 other questions to answer before you can get anywhere near the "more resolution" question.

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