The tube tester picture, the full size one, is 12 meg. Proper pictures are massive.
20 years ago, gulp, I was on a project that digitised professional high quality 35mm slides of wildlife.
There was no point in going above 3k*5k resolution; if you did then you were digirising grain. Those images were stored as, IIRC, 27MB TIFFs. The jpgs were, of course, much smaller.
So, quite frankly, I remain to be convinced that high quality required 12MB or more. The pictures might be that, but that's not the same thing as needing to be 12MB.
And then there's the issue of whether the lens and photographer are good enough! Many cameras have "creative" specs that mean little in practice but which give journalists and undemanding purchasers something to talk about.
35mm film isn’t very big and the resolution isn’t very high. The grain limits that.
Things have however somewhat changed. Having 35mm was like saving reality in an 80% quality jpeg at 1024x768 (I exaggerate a little there). We’re mostly used to looking at stuff on screens. Then you get used to a Retina display and everything looks like shit suddenly.
20 years later we have better mass produced optics, amazing sensors and image processing engines in our hands. Looking at an iPhone for example, the camera on which has made my DSLR gather dust.
Now when you grab a consumer DSLR you’re buying dynamic range, the glass and the image processing engine. This makes a hell of a difference. If you have more pixels you can make more rational use of interpolation and noise reduction algorithms.
As cost rises, dynamic range increases, sensor size increases and you can trade noise for resolution and speed basically as and when you need it. So your sports or press photographer can snap an action photo at 120000 ISO equivalent with no noise. And you can use the same camera to shoot a billboard sized print in one go.
Then there’s 4K video which uses the same tech.
Talent however is an issue. My father, a notorious photographers, wasn’t all that good sonyoure right there.
Then again from an art perspective the best photo I ever took was on Ilford B&W film I shot on an old Praktika camera with Zeiss lens and developed and printed myself in the spare toilet at home.
My first digital camera was a Canon Ion. Been around a while in this side of things
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