I’ve been thinking about this recently. I’ve noticed many old music videos and television shows. Specifically old Beatles music videos and old Twilight Zone episodes have been remastered for Blu-ray with almost no imperfections whatsoever. My question is, how is it that something shot on 35mm film can looks so clear when transcribed to digital? How is it that it can project so large on a screen when the film itself is so tiny?
Thank you
In: 7
Everything you see is being projected onto your retina at the back of your eye, which is basically a screen slightly smaller than a frame of 35 mm film. All the light coming into your eye, which means everything you see at any instant, is being squeezed onto that tiny space by a lens at the front of your eye.
In fact, if you look at [a diagram of how the light rays travel toward and into the eye](https://www.google.com/search?q=image+upside+down+retina), you’ll see that the “image” shrinks to a size small enough to fit through your pupil, and continues shrinking down to an infinitely small point in the middle of your eye, and then it enlarges again, upside-down, finally arriving at the retina.
So basically there is no limit to how small an image can be. The only limit is in the ability of the projection “screen”, be it your retina or a frame of film or a sensor in a digital camera, to resolve and store the detail.
For film, looking at the density of silver halide crystals is a good starting point, but they clump together and aren’t evenly distributed like pixels, and the film is layered, with the color being provided in dye clouds which aren’t as precise as the crystal clumps. So it’s difficult to make a comparison to a digital sensor which has precise pixels on a perfect grid.
Ultimately, the detail you can get in a frame of 35 mm film is equivalent to somewhere between a “4K” (8.3 megapixel) and “8K” (33 megapixel) digital image, tending toward the low side of that range.
I’ve been thinking about this recently. I’ve noticed many old music videos and television shows. Specifically old Beatles music videos and old Twilight Zone episodes have been remastered for Blu-ray with almost no imperfections whatsoever. My question is, how is it that something shot on 35mm film can looks so clear when transcribed to digital? How is it that it can project so large on a screen when the film itself is so tiny?
Thank you
In: 7
Everything you see is being projected onto your retina at the back of your eye, which is basically a screen slightly smaller than a frame of 35 mm film. All the light coming into your eye, which means everything you see at any instant, is being squeezed onto that tiny space by a lens at the front of your eye.
In fact, if you look at [a diagram of how the light rays travel toward and into the eye](https://www.google.com/search?q=image+upside+down+retina), you’ll see that the “image” shrinks to a size small enough to fit through your pupil, and continues shrinking down to an infinitely small point in the middle of your eye, and then it enlarges again, upside-down, finally arriving at the retina.
So basically there is no limit to how small an image can be. The only limit is in the ability of the projection “screen”, be it your retina or a frame of film or a sensor in a digital camera, to resolve and store the detail.
For film, looking at the density of silver halide crystals is a good starting point, but they clump together and aren’t evenly distributed like pixels, and the film is layered, with the color being provided in dye clouds which aren’t as precise as the crystal clumps. So it’s difficult to make a comparison to a digital sensor which has precise pixels on a perfect grid.
Ultimately, the detail you can get in a frame of 35 mm film is equivalent to somewhere between a “4K” (8.3 megapixel) and “8K” (33 megapixel) digital image, tending toward the low side of that range.
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