William Robb wrote: > This is the point that is being <deliberately I think> missed. > The advantage of medium format is that there is more film. > More film means less magnification needed to get to the final > image.
It seems that one side of this argument is talking about magnification of object-to-film, and the other side is talking about film-to-paper. I think we need to look at the whole process. If you shoot a coin at 1:1 and enlarge to fill an 8x8" sheet with the coin's rim just touching the edges of the paper, then the total magnification (object-to-paper) is independent of the film format. The tonality difference between formats comes from the fact that the intermediate magnification of object-to-film can be increased by using a larger piece of film. This correspondingly reduces the film-to-paper magnification during enlargement, which is the only place where tonality is affected. So you might shoot a macro at 1:1 on 35mm and enlarge 10x to fit 8x10" paper, or you could shoot at 10x magnification onto 8x10" sheet film, and make a contact print. The 8x10" film will end up with a technically better result (tonality-wise anyway) but the compromise is that most of us would rather not set up such an 8x10" rig more than once :) Now that I think about it, this is exactly paralleled by the printing resolution of digital files. You can print a 10Mb file at 100ppi, or a 160Mb file at 400ppi to achieve the same size print. The bigger file will hold more detail under close scrutiny, the compromise being a pretty steep law of diminishing returns regarding the file size. Cheers, - Dave http://www.digistar.com/~dmann/
