But with more detail comes more perceived sharpness, no?
The print is the important part, so keeping sharpness all the way to the print is important. And more details would look sharper than blobs, no?
No. there is nothing between the lines of what i wrote.
Once i had a student who printed a mural print about 30X45 inches. Folks used to pass by it and ask what format it was and were amazed at the level of detail. It was a 35mm negative, of some not important type of film, and standard sprint or other generic developer. It was shot with a canon 50mm lens on some not important model.
The lesson here is that the format has nothing to do with sharpness, or detail. A blurry 4X5 negative will be blurry compared to a not blurry 35mm negative.
Its much easier to have not blurry negatives, the smaller the format. The camera is smaller and lighter thus less prone to shake, the lenses are shorter, thus depth of field is larger, which in turn gives you more aperture to work with for the same level of depth of field, thus the shutter speed is shorter, which helps making not blurry images.
So - as i said above - the larger the format - the harder it is to make sharp images.
I do not know what "perceived sharpness" means.
Size has little or nothing to do with sharpness either, just go back and read the many, many threads here and on LFPF about "allowed circles of confusion" (or you can read it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle_of_confusion). In short - the larger the print, the further away you have to stand to understand what you are looking at. While its "cool" to be able to stick your face into a large print, and see that is is sharp, it does not really mean anything, and not hard to do, just use a smaller negative, that is unless you really need to use some camera movments (in which case you can use an MF camera with movements or shoot roll film in a back).
When you go and look at real big prints in museums, like kandida hoffer, or gursky, or jeff wall, or avedon, they are not really sharp, even when you are 2 meters away, and thats because its super hard to have such larger negatives that are sharp. At zero enlargement they are pretty cool to look at. Which is why i guess it was suggested that if you want a 20X24 print to look like a 4X5 contact print looks like, you need to contact a 20X24 negative.