film resolution

the heart of the aps system is obviously the film. the main complaint you will hear about aps is that because the film area is only 57% of 35mm, aps isn't suitable for blowups. i've uploaded an example to counter this myth. this is a shot i took of my daughter in the park. it's been compressed to make it web friendly.

if you look at the detail from this shot that i have also uploaded, you will see very little evidence of film grain. the resolution is high enough to show a single stray hair near her ear! i would venture that most of the resolution limitations in the shot are due to the jpeg artifacts from the film scanning and not the aps film itself.

i'm not advocating aps for extreme blowups or professional work but my experience has been that well exposed shots will enlarge to 8" x 12" without any problems. 35mm wasn't developed for still work. it was originally motion picture film that leica adapted to a still camera. it took years before it was widely accepted as a replacement for the larger 120 format that was the kodak standard at the time. there has been considerable progress in film chemistry over the years especially with the introduction of tabular grain film technology in the 1970's. when kodak developed the aps format, they took this into account and their tests gave them confidence that the new format had fine enough film grain.

the size of the aps sensor became the defacto standard for digital cameras. this is one advantage aps has over 35mm. when you use some aps slr cameras, such as the canon eos ix, because the film plane is the same size as a canon digital censor, when you swap out camera bodies between digital and aps, the focal length is the same. if you switch from digital to 35mm the lens will become more wide angle because the 35mm has a larger film plane.