Maybe someone else knows why black and white film looks sharper and has more detail then. Was there a race to the bottom in terms of optics when color film showed up in the consumer camera? Is it because they moved to a smaller film stock than the medium format 120 film that was common in B&W cameras before color? Or is color film, with three layers of gelatin, an inherently "noisier" film stock?

I don't know. I only observe the quality fall off when color arrives. Worse, I am not even sure. that my mom's 35mm camera (Canon AE-1) in the 70's shot as good and crisp photos as the B&W cameras in the family in the 40's (before she was born though).

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_aavaa_ a day ago | parent [-]

There’s multiple things going on.

The larger the film stock, the easier it is to get a certain final resolution. Both because the film itself needs to be magnified less when creating the final print and because the lenses don’t need to create as small of an image.

And BW film even today is still MUCH sharper, even if just perceptually, than color film.

	▲	johnmaguire 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> And BW film even today is still MUCH sharper, even if just perceptually, than color film. Maybe perceptually - due to stronger contrast and perhaps also the fact that B&W film often comes in higher speeds and probably incurs less motion blur of the subject overall. But I don't think it's actually objectively sharper per se?
	▲	brudgers 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		No one has ever looked at a photograph and wept because it was so sharp... ...of course many photographers have wept because a photograph wasn't sharp.