>>3980141That's the secret of the greats. They all printed small. Stiechen, stiglitz, Adam, Weston, they all printed 2x enlargements or smaller. Weston even reduced the size, printing smaller than 8x10 (his format). Ilford makes paper up to 40" rolls, which require special wall mounted enlarger. For big darkroom prints, I'd drum scan 6x6 or 4x5 then make a digital negative, then contact print that.
Film essentially uses a random sample with high noise, where digital uses grid sample with low noise. Digital looks good until you hit a certain ppi, then it looks terrible. Film can be printed larger since there is more info, though the signal is weaker. This only applies to film vs digital of the same size. It's much easier to scale up the size of film, vs digital sensor. So it's not even a contest when comparing even the best "medium" format digital sensor to MF film. Sure the SNR is higher on digital, but the grain holds up better to enlargement.
For film, shoot slow film, I mostly use provia, ektar, and fp4. Provia or ektar in 35mm will go toe to toe with any full frame digital camera when printing, especially on large prints past the digitals 300ppi resolution limit.
4x5 is truly unmatched by basically any digital camera system. I make fine art prints of art for artists with slide film, I scan the slides at 5000 ppi, which is about the limit of the film. That's a whopping 500mp, and I could scan it up to 8000ppi on my unis drum scanner if I wanted to. I've been wanting to shoot a ultra slow film on 4x5 like rpx 25 or cms 20, but I'll have to get around to that.
