Thanks those are better terms. I remember doing a test where the camera photographs a ceramic plate with an almost perfectly black diagonal line to calculate the effective resolution, but I can't remember what it's called, maybe the diffraction limit. It's basically a measure of how blurry the image is, where a matched lens and sensor would look like a Bresenham line with no antialiasing.

TBH, I think that the scientific community has huge blind spots, mostly due to its own gatekeeping. Some of the things like this that seem to be a struggle remind me of the design-by-committee descent of web development. The brilliant academic work of the 1990s has been mostly replaced by nondeterministic async soup and build processes of such complexity that we have to be full stack developers just to get anything done. All the fault of private industry hoarding the wealth and avoiding any R&D that might risk its meal ticket. Starving the public of grants, much less reforms that are actively blocked like UBI. Now nobody ever seems to step back and examine problems from first principles anymore. That's all I was trying to do.

Edit: I found the term for calculating the effective resolution of a camera with a high-contrast diagonal line, it's "slanted edge modulation transfer function (MTF)":

https://harvestimaging.com/blog/?p=1328

https://www.strollswithmydog.com/the-slanted-edge-method/

https://www.eckop.com/resources/optical-testing/resolution-t...