At what stage in terms of megapixels does a photo shot on a digital camera begin to equate with 35 mm.?

Question

Thank you all so far for your answers. I used a Canon t90 and a Yashica TLR for a number of years doing my own developing and printing particularly of B&W. I bought a 3.2 MP digital a few years back and I agree with Fireant3 that on 6x4 or 5x7 there is little difference between 35mm and the digital. I wondered, however, what kind of digital resolution would be needed for something like 20x16 of which size I have many prints from 35mm at good quality. Question was really prompted when recently scanning 35mm and medium format negs into computer

Answer 1

I read somewhere that 11mp is about equal to 35mm. I might be wrong.

Answer 2

As you can see by the range of answers given to your question, a lot of us have difficulty with math. If you want good quality 20x16 inch prints then the math is at 72dpi which is the density of your monitor. Therefore a 20x16 inch print would be 1440 x 1152 = 1.65 Mp, DOH!

This of course assumes that you have a good quality printer like a large carriage Epson PhotoStylus 2400 or Canon photo printer.

Where the digital print will fall apart is in colour saturation. It seems regardless of the ISO setting, film just seems to suck in more colour. Of course, at ISO 100, digital still has some noise challenges.

With a camera like Canon's new 10Mp Rebel, you should be able to make a print large enough to wallpaper your den. You'll need to find a print shop with a very wide carriage printer though.

Answer 3

I agree with the answers already given, just wanted to add this: there's no need to obsess about megapixels and think that you have to buy a $1000+ 10 megapixel camera so you can "equal" 35mm. I have a 2-megapixel from 4 years ago that produces a 4"x6" a LOT of people can't tell the difference from film on. Yes, more resolution can't hurt, but 5 megapixels is plenty unless you're planning on printing a lot of 8"x10" and bigger prints.

Answer 4

The way I see it there's quite a few years to go yet for digital to truely overtake what 35mm film is capable of, not only in terms of grain vs megapixels but also in the range and colour aspects. I doubt anyone could really challenge 25 film yet without going to medium format digital, but that's cheating! ;-)

Negative and slide scanners are different, they've grown to be pretty damn good at the high end of the consumer market, and even for just a few hundred Pounds you can get a very nice scanner that will do for just about any situation, certainly for screen work, but no doubt there is still plenty of room for improvement!

Answer 5

It's varies from roughly 8MP for consumer color film up to 25MP for pro black & white film. And note that you'll only get 25MP worth of resolution in combination with a quality lens.
35mm film also has about 2 extra stops of dynamic range - digital will clip the highlights a bit sooner and more abruptly than film.
On the other hand, digital handles high ISO much better than film.

Answer 6

One difficulty is the different characteristics of the results another is that it depends on the film/ camera combination you are considering. But I would say a 'good' 35mm SLR and a good 10 MPixel (SLR) camera are about the same at A4 or even upto A3 size enlargements.

Answer 7

Its about 10 Mp. To be honest though, You'd never tell the difference at about 6 Mp. The only noticable difference comes when you want to blow the picture up to about 4 or 5 times its original size

Answer 8

Based on comparing grain size to pixel size, I think it's about 21 MP, but you need extreme magnification to see the difference beyond about 10-12 MP. I mean extreme magnification.

Answer 9

1.93 billion pixels. the size of a molecule.

Answer 10

It never will!