Blog · June 28, 2026

What resolution do you need to scan film

5MP, 10MP, 22MP: what the numbers mean for prints, screens, and storage, without the marketing fog.

Scanner marketing loves big megapixel numbers. What matters is what you will do with the photos.

What common resolutions give you

• 5MP, 2592 x 1944 pixels: full-screen viewing on any TV or tablet, sharp prints up to 13 x 18 cm, comfortable prints at 20 x 25 cm
• 10MP: adds cropping headroom, prints to 30 x 40 cm
• 22MP and beyond: archival and professional reproduction

For family use, screens are where photos live now. A 4K television is an 8MP display, and a 5MP scan viewed on it fills the screen convincingly because film grain, not pixels, is usually the visible limit.

The honest limit of old film

Consumer film shot on consumer cameras resolves less detail than people expect. Scanning a slightly soft 1980 snapshot at 22MP produces a large file of the same slightly soft photo. The scan cannot exceed the source.

File sizes, in practice

A 5MP JPEG runs 2 to 3MB. A 16GB SD card holds about 5,000 scans, which covers most family collections on a single card.

Our take

Finish beats perfect. A complete archive at 5MP, done over a few weekends and backed up, is worth more than 200 museum-grade scans and a project that stalled. If a handful of frames deserve more, have those few professionally drum-scanned later; the originals are still in your drawer.