Since I was talking about the attitude of traditional film users to this idea of "too much resolution if not all lenses can make use of it", it is a little strange bringing scanning into the story;
Hi,
Many people do not fathom that the resolution or acutance film/sensor alone, doesn't mean much in isolation. A film alone doesn't a picture make... What's more, many people still think that the worse element of the imaging chain sets the limit (as some may interpret the subject line you changed from the OP's), while the limit will actually be worse than the worst component, because the MTFs multiply. It therefore helps most to improve the worst element of a chain, as it does in a real chain.
I would think that most of those B&W film users were printing in the darkroom rather than scanning!
Maybe, maybe not. Anyway, it seems harder every day to produce silver-based output, and easier to produce inkjet output. Also posting on the web or archiving digital copies off-site will require scanning the material, and it gets harder to find a competent scanner operator (and even scanners). So it is a development that will add another MTF to the imaging chain.
And why do you bring color films into the discussion when I was specifically talking about fine-grained B&W films?
Because there are only a few true monochrome digital cameras / backs around, and most people base their judgment on a Bayer CFA equipped sensor array, and that will lower the MTF50 metric. Besides, post-processing an image that is color from the start will allow much better control over B/W tonality than with a simple lens filter, so one can produce creatively superior results.
I do not dispute that recent 35mm format sensors out-resolve color film.
But thank you for reminding me of Technical Pan: by the measures in that Kodak document and the one above, there is not much between them, but TMAX100 has somewhat higher MTF across most of the frequency range.
Yes, but with very low granularity (=5) for the Technical Pan, versus the T-MAX 100 (=18), thus allowing huge output with little grain showing.
Cheers,
Bart