Information density is kind of counterintuitive.
The best prosumer digital camera out there has a sensor that compares poorly in terms of resolution to what you can get from a large-format photographic film frame. Teensy-weensy CCDs crammed onto a chip are still bigger than teensier-weensier grains of photosensitive chemicals.
And if you wanted to send a few hundred thousand of those pictures at full resolution across the country, you could do it pretty quickly with a high-speed, ultra-high-resolution scanner and a dedicated T3 line… but putting the originals in a crate and FedExing them would be much faster.
Analog reality is pretty badass! Much more so than we need it to be, really, which is why we can throw so much of it away and still get stunningly detailed digital images.
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