[aasasd]

> very high resolution photo of the aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart

I thought photo quality was rather meh until the 50s or at least the 40s? Even with large films the results are often muddy in olden shots—while 70 mm movie film from the 60s will probably still be redigitized into super-duper-hd formats in the late 21st century (e.g. https://youtu.be/sCv-dIFGcd0).

[adzm]

There are a bunch of crisp photographs from the late 30s. The hard part was getting the subject to stay still long enough and not blur the background, since the higher resolution / finer grain required a longer exposure time / wider aperture. You can check out various archives for examples, https://www.shorpy.com/ is one.

[aposm]

This is not quite correct... For motion picture film, yes, anything older than the 70mm film you're talking about tends to be low-resolution because of the physical constraints of moving a foot or more of film through a camera each second. However, still photos from that era were much better - the limitations of film stocks were lighting, and with enough light to gather, a large format photo could be extremely sharp and high-resolution (if that was the priority). It sounds like this is referring to a formal portrait setting, with potentially very bright studio lighting and high quality film, so it could easily be sharper than all but very recent digital cameras (as large-format film still is).

[kubb]

I think the thought experiment still "works" (as much as philosophers can say something useful about the question it poses) even if the photo was upscaled.

[nonrandomstring]

Yeah, it was taken in like 1938 or something. Scanned using modern gear. Of course, it's surprising how much detail comes out of chemical photography of that era. But you're right, the "resolution" is arbitrary and probably oversampled.

[nicbou]

Have a look at Ansel Adam's photography. The sharpness is outstanding.