Equivalent analogue MegaPixels

[SteveEllis]

Hi Guys,

I was wondering what is the equivalent megapixels of an analogue photo thats put onto cd when you get your film developed.

This may be one of those "How long is a piece of string" questions but I thought I'd ask anyway

Cheers,
Steve.

 

[Rob]

Unfortunately that's a chalk and cheese question.

Most labs scan film at an amount which generates a jpg of around 1-2Mb (that I've come across anyway) per 35mm frame. That would probably be equivilent to a 4-8MP digital camera in terms of image information I would guess....

The trouble is, with film you can scan right down to micron type levels and generate HUGE files. Whether this shows up any more detail or whatever is really a matter of opinion. My Nikon film scanner produced TIFFs which were in the region of 40Mb.

Commercial lab scans to CD seem to my mind to be about as enlargeable as a 4MP image. That is, however, just my opinion.

Rob

 

[Big Mike]

It really depends...some labs (most probably) have the ability to set the 'resolution' of their scan outputs.

I haven't shot much film in the last year but when I did, I had all my shots put on a CD when they were developed. Most of the image files were between 400 to 600kb...not very big at all. They were basically good enough to print at 4x6. I did make larger prints from those files...but it took some work to make them look OK.

The same lab, also had a premium CD package. I don't recall the size of those images but they were bigger with a higher resolution.

Check different labs in your area, to find out what your options are.