Re: Digital vs 35mm camera optics

From: AES/newspost (siegman_at_stanford.edu)
Date: 08/18/04 

Date: Wed, 18 Aug 2004 10:58:56 -0700

In article <4b78e1a9.0408180641.72e5e96d@posting.google.com>,
 jacarter3@onebox.com (Jamie Carter) wrote:

> This discussion has moved from the optical scientist to the realm of
> the consumer. I worked at Kodak in the (very) early 80s when the Kodak
> "disc" camera made its debut. Back then, Kodak still did a great deal

                          (remainder snipped)

Without doubting or quarreling with anything in this or earlier
messages, could I re-phrase a couple of the questions involved in the
discussion:

1) My impression has been that the number of resolvable spots on a
single frame of reasonable quality 35 mm film is quite a bit larger than
the total number of individual pixels on the image sensor of a typical
few-megapixel digital camera. True?

2) If so, seems this would imply that a 35 mm camera with a good enough
lens, focused carefully enough, held sufficiently motion-free, and so
on, could capture a correspondingly larger amount of detail, or have
correspondingly better resolution, than the typical consumer digital
sensor with any level of optics. Reasonable deduction?

3) Taken in reverse, this says that the requirements on the optics that
are needed to approach the limiting capability of the sensor in a
digital camera will be less stringent (or easier to achieve?) than those
needed to approach the limiting capability of a 35 mm film camera. True?

As best I remember the original post, it was question #3 that the OP was
attempting to ask.

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