If all of the files are on the 8 - 12 MP territory, that comparison, will either result in immediate “WTF am I doing here” feeling or sowing the seeds of FUDD.
That's going to happen anyway because almost nobody is qualified to even do such a comparison, even if they had top flight scans.
I started off delivering only 24MP scans in Adobe DNG format, then updated to 32MP scans and can now deliver very good 45MP scans, and guess what? Despite my very reasonable and competitive pricing, the very downscaled small 2MP scan size is the most money most people are willing to spend on scans. When I ask which scans they want, they ask about the price difference between the scans and choose based on price, not on scan resolution or technical specs. It's very rare that they even ask about resolution, and you'd be shocked and amazed at how many people don't know what a tiff file is, much less a floating point DNG file. It wasn't until I "dumbed down" my offerings that my business really took off, because then people didn't have to know anything other than you got processing, and could get small, medium, or large scans, and/or a choice between two different sized prints. I've actually had to change how I deliver files because a significant number of people never even look at their scans on the computer, they use their phones or tablets, and I've had to accommodate that to cut down on the amount of time I spend on support getting people their scans. It's not the same world it was even 5 years ago.
There has always been a small minority inspiring and leading the masses. Not projecting here. I’m probably not one of those.
I'm a realist and don't want to project either, but at the same time, I'd like to think that I'm at least a little bit of a trail blazer in choosing to not go with traditional lab equipment and going down the path that I did, but if there's anything I've learned it's that the path I chose has almost no real appreciators, and even among the people that do know and care, a lot of them will disqualify your path on some minor technical thing that doesn't really make any difference, but that they don't personally approve of, so you often end up not getting their business anyway, which leaves you marketing to the masses just to stay in business, who in my experience, largely don't know, and as I said before, as long as your least expensive offering doesn't look terrible, largely don't care, because they're mostly looking at it on a phone or tablet screen.
Fact of the matter is, film need not be relegated to iPhone territory scans.
Sooner or later someone will want a poster size print or use. crop of a photo.
I completely agree, which is why my baseline scan is 45MP, however, even my smallest sized deliverable makes a passable poster sized print. The medium size scan would look better if you decided to get up close to the print, but if the small scan was printed 24x36, framed, and hanging on the wall, if you walked into the room and saw it, you wouldn't think it was low resolution. Same if they had it as a screen saver or slideshow on a giant TV. Sure, the medium sized scan would look marginally sharper upon close inspection, but nobody would complain that the small scan looked soft. Even if you had the two scans side by side, a lot of people would be hard pressed to point out specific differences between them.
At some point additional resolution doesn’t matter. You can sit and watch super 35 20 foot high on a gigantic theater screen from the front row and you’re not going to complain that the real resolution of the system is too low.
This is largely true. Yes, resolutions increase over time due to the march of technology progression, and capitalism's need to keep selling you new stuff, but the reality of the matter is 2MP to 8MP is the sweet spot for most viewing environments, including most prints, even the big ones. You can see a really big image quality jump from standard def displays to HD displays, and if the content was mastered at 8K or higher resolution, a marginal increase in visible picture quality from HD to 4K displays, but it's already well into diminishing returns at that point. If the content was mastered in 4K, the difference between watching in HD or 4K is shockingly close, and this is with top flight practices and procedures to acquire as much resolution as possible and keep the entire authoring chain as high resolution as possible for as long as possible. Yeah, 5 to 10 years from now we'll be acquiring in 8K or higher res as standard practice, and 4K to 8K displays will totally be the norm, but I think it will be that simply due to attrition over time and not because it looks sharper. We're already at sensor resolution densities that make old lenses look soft compared to modern optics when zooming in and pixel peeping. Anybody who tells you otherwise hasn't seen an old lens put on a newish body, then taken the same picture with an even remotely newish lens on the same body. It's like night and day. But, you zoom out, look at it on a nice big 4K display, the difference is a lot harder to see.