If you're at all interested in cost vs. benefit when it comes to photography, you need to take a look at this:
Having happily shot 10-12 megapixel digital images for the past 3 years, a trip to Zion Canyon Field Institute's photography workshop this past September really opened my eyes. Seeing the large chromes on the lightbox forced me to confront what I'd been avoiding for years: in order to print big, you need to shoot big.
Now, "big" is a relative term. You'll see in this graphic that a 24mp image isn't as large as you'd think when compared to the 12mp images. But when these relatively small images are compared to medium & large format photographs, "big" takes on a whole new meaning.
And as if that weren't enough reason to take another look at MF & LF film, the cost of these newest high MP digital cameras capable of these "not so large afterall" images is staggering-compared to the low cost of MF & LF film gear these days-and you can shoot a lot of film for the cost difference.
Addendum: at this writing, things seem a little stalled out in the digital realm, around that 12-24mp cap. There's a good bit of discussion about why, a few theories center around the inability of contemporary D/SLR lenses to resolve images much larger than that resolution cap. Or more to the point, project a high-enough quality image to keep up with the digital sensor's ability to record and render it. Medium format lenses don't have this limitation. From the beginning they've been designed to project larger images onto a larger film planes. If this is the case, in the realm of the D/SLR space, it seems unlikely that any time soon this problem would be solved. Food for thought.
Hopefully this graphic will illustrate the point in easy to digest visual information. Enjoy.
To view the Medium Format images gallery please click here.